Our farmers have done their part. Now our institutions must do theirs
In 2025, Chad harvested around 3 million tonnes of cereals, 10% above the average of the previous five years. Yet in the 2026 lean season, 3.18 million Chadians were food insecure. And on 9 September 2026, citing erratic rainfall, the government banned cereal exports. When a good harvest does not feed the country, the problem is not the rain. It is the way we govern the sector.
More cereals, no less hunger
The FAO GIEWS country brief published on 7 September 2026 should have read as good news. Cereal production in 2025 exceeded the five-year average. In July 2026, coarse grains were selling 20 to 45% cheaper than a year earlier. For urban consumers, that is a relief. For producers, it is a year of work that pays less. With no warehouse, no credit and no buyer willing to wait, they sell at rock-bottom prices right after the harvest, at the very moment when the National Food Security Office (ONASA) should be buying to rebuild the security stock. And for 3.18 million people, 17% of the population analysed, including 241,000 in the emergency phase according to the Cadre Harmonisé of March 2026, the June to August 2026 lean season remains an ordeal. The grain is in the South, the hunger is in the East and the Sahel, and between the two lies the road.
Then the 2026 season changed course. On 8 September, the government and its partners met over erratic rains threatening crops in the centre, east and north of the country. The next day, an arrêté (ministerial order) of the Ministry of Trade and Industry banned the export of millet, maize, rice, sorghum, wheat, cottonseed, bran and oilcake; only sesame, groundnuts and cotton lint remain authorised. On the same day, the Ministry of Finance exempted cereal and livestock feed imports from duties and taxes.
The reaction is understandable: when the rain fails, a government protects people’s plates first. But above all, it shows what we lack. A state that buys when prices are at their lowest has a reserve when the rain is late. A state that has not done so is left with nothing but the border. And once again, it is the producer who pays. Having sold 20 to 45% cheaper in 2025, farmers can no longer sell to neighbouring countries, while imported grain comes in duty-free. On a border as long as ours, a ban also risks becoming one more toll.
The paradox is not new. The country has 39 million hectares of arable land and cultivates only about 11% of it. It irrigates 43,000 hectares out of 5.6 million that could be irrigated. Fewer than 5% of producers use improved seed, and fewer than 2.5% use fertiliser. The 2015 general livestock census put its herd at 94 million head. Agriculture accounts for around 40% of GDP according to the World Bank. The potential is there. It lies dormant.
The national plan Tchad Connexion 2030, adopted on 29 May 2025, sets the goal of doubling agricultural production by 2030. The ambition is right. The real question lies elsewhere: with which institutions?
Farmers are not the weak link
Since 2019, first as a project, Job Booster Chad has supported young people, women, rural micro-enterprises and producer organisations, with a network of more than 185 field advisers. In seven years, we have supported more than 3,000 producers in eight provinces. We are neither a ministry nor a cooperation agency. We are a social enterprise. We live off the services we provide, and we know what a useless service costs.
This position forces us to look both ways. On one side, I see hard-working producers, ready to invest when the investment pays. On the other, I see the institutions meant to support them, whether public, community-based or aid-funded, wearing themselves out producing reports rather than results. Seven years have taught me one thing: the Chadian farmer is rarely the weak link. What gives way is almost always what surrounds them.
A state that does not measure what it does for its farmers
Let us start at the top. The World Bank (agricultural sub-sector analysis, February 2022) counted 712 extension agents for 11 million farmers, or one adviser for more than 15,000 producers. By the late 2000s, Ethiopia was already deploying some 45,000, or one agent for fewer than 500 farm households according to IFPRI. Doubling production by 2030 with one adviser for 15,000 farmers is wishful thinking, not strategy.
Accountability is as lacking as resources. The African Union assesses its members’ agricultural commitments every two years. In the fourth Biennial Review, published in February 2024, Chad was among the six countries that did not submit their data on time. No recent public figure shows what share of the budget goes to agriculture. The last available review, covering 2003-2012, put it at 5.7% of expenditure, far from the 10% pledged in Maputo. The 2026 budget, passed at CFA 2,531.5 billion, prioritises education, health and infrastructure. Agriculture, which supports the majority of the working population, does not feature among the announced quantified priorities.
On the ground, this deficit takes a concrete form: the service that arrives too late. A licence, an inspection, a laboratory test, support promised for sowing and delivered after the harvest. The producer has often paid, and has no recourse. Then the road takes its cut. On 21 September 2026, according to Tchadinfos, fruit transporters denounced CFA 575,000 levied per vehicle at a border post with Cameroon, and CFA 7,500 instead of the regulatory CFA 5,000 on the Moundou-N’Djamena road. Every franc taken on the road is a franc taken from the price paid at the farm gate.
Let us be fair. The state is hosting more than 914,000 Sudanese refugees who have arrived since April 2023, dealing with the aftermath of the 2024 floods that damaged 418,300 hectares, and coping with volatile oil revenues. These constraints are real. They make good governance more urgent, not less. Publishing agricultural budget execution every year, submitting Biennial Review data on time, setting enforceable deadlines for every service delivered to producers: none of these measures is expensive, and all of them would change the relationship between the administration and those it serves.
Farmer organisations in the image of their institutions
When the state does not account for itself, it is hard to demand better from the organisations it oversees. Those we support often reproduce its failings, on the scale of a village.
In one of them, which I visited a few months ago, the annual membership fee was considered impossible to pay. No one had ever divided it by the number of members. Per person, it came to between 150 and 200 CFA francs a month. When the calculation appeared on the board, an elected officer blurted out, almost embarrassed: “But that, we can afford.” The problem had never been money. It was trust.
This trust wears away in ways everyone knows and no one names in meetings. Key positions held by one family, so that the audit committee checks an uncle’s accounts. A founder who reminds every general assembly of what he invested and sacrificed: his sacrifice is real, but a moral debt that nothing records is never repaid; it becomes a claim of ownership over the organisation. Decisions voted and then postponed from one season to the next, which elected officers justified to me with disarming candour by “compassion towards producers” and “fear of creating conflict”. Yet a rule that is never enforced punishes those who respect it. Whoever has repaid their loan sees their neighbour keep the money without consequence, and the following season does the same.
Members bear their share too. Many join for what they hope to receive. They demand equipment without paying dues and sell alone to the first buyer when group marketing is slow. Producers summed it up to me bluntly: the aid they depended on “is drying up”.
The good news is that these fixes do not require money. They require courage. Display the membership fee per member and per month. Reserve services for members in good standing. Rent out elected officers’ equipment under a signed agreement. Require leaders to declare their assets. Replace expulsion, so heavy that no one applies it, with graduated sanctions. Attach every decision to a person and a date. We have seen it: when an organisation commits to this, the conversation changes within a single session.
Projects that manufacture numbers
I am part of this system and I cannot spare it. Agricultural projects, and operators like us who implement them, are judged on numbers: producers reached, groups trained, women and young people enrolled.
Farmers saw what this produces long before we did. Projects, they say, sign up everyone who turns up. Opportunists end up alongside genuine producers and abandon ship at the first difficulty. Work launched with large numbers ends up resting on the small core that stayed loyal. Statutes impose a minimum number of groups, so people are enrolled rather than selected. Leaders are appointed by project facilitators rather than elected by their peers, and lose their authority the day the project leaves.
This dependency goes beyond farmer organisations. In the 2026 budget, grants amount to CFA 401 billion out of CFA 2,275 billion in planned resources excluding deficit financing, nearly 18%. When such a large share of the money comes from elsewhere, priorities and indicators often come from elsewhere too. We measure what is easy to count rather than what lasts.
Here again, the fix depends less on budgets than on the rules of the game. Select members on the basis of their actual activity. Measure how many remain active after two seasons, and what share of its running costs the organisation pays itself. Let leaders be elected, even if the timetable slips. Build tapering support, in which the organisation takes on a larger share of its costs each year.
There is a way out, including here
None of the above is unique to Chad. Other poor, landlocked or Sahelian countries have faced the same dead ends. Some have found their way out, and their answers can be transferred.
Ethiopia made agricultural advice a state priority. Behind its 45,000 or so development agents, deployed down to rural municipalities, there were also some 8,500 farmer training centres. The system was not perfect: at the time it reached only 35 to 40% of households. But the political choice was clear, and it endured.
Rwanda entrusted advice to farmers themselves. Its national Twigire Muhinzi system trains farmers, not civil servants, to run farmer field schools. For the 2022B season, the Rwanda Agriculture and Animal Resources Development Board (RAB) planned to train more than 14,000 of them to pass practices on to their neighbours on demonstration plots. The FAO Investment Centre notes that agricultural advice now reaches every village in the country. For a state that cannot pay thousands of agents, this is the most directly transferable lesson.
Niger, our Sahelian neighbour, turned the granary into collateral. Through warrantage (inventory credit), producers store their harvest in a secure warehouse managed by their organisation and obtain credit backed by that stock. They are no longer forced to sell at rock-bottom prices right after the harvest. In 2009, around a hundred farmer organisations and some ten microfinance institutions took part. Credit rose from about CFA 40 million over 1997-2005 to nearly CFA 1.5 billion in 2009, with an average gain of 25 to 35% over six months for producers. With cereal prices falling by 20 to 45% in a year, this is the tool that is missing at scale.
And Chad itself has provided the proof. In 2024-2025, seed cotton production fell to 57,774 tonnes, with a yield of 424 kg per hectare. A year later, the 2025-2026 season reached 150,000 tonnes and a yield of nearly 900 kg per hectare, thanks above all to better inputs delivered on time, according to Ibrahim Malloum, Director General of Cotontchad SN. Cultivated area grew by only about a fifth; production rose 2.6-fold. Above all, the country organised what reaches the field.
These examples take different forms, but they share a logic. The institution serves producers instead of administering them, and the farmer organisation provides concrete services, financed by what producers already own.
Producers pay for what pays them
At Job Booster, we see it every day: producers willingly pay for a service that pays them back. They refuse to pay for a structure that gives them nothing. That is why we created the Booster Impact Fund, a micro impact fund to finance the entrepreneurs we support. Since its launch, the fund has granted nine loans benefiting 26 rural producers, with a repayment rate of over 50% after one year. The figure looks modest. It is explained by repayment schedules aligned with harvests, some of which have not yet fallen due, and by a first cycle in which producers and the fund are learning to work together. It is this rate, more than the number of loans, that will show whether the fund keeps its promise.
The model to build is neither all-state nor all-project. It is an ecosystem in which the state regulates and meets its deadlines, farmer organisations operate as service businesses, and advisers are paid for the results they produce in the field. These advisers can be trained young rural people: agricultural advice is also a source of jobs, and our field advisers already demonstrate it. External aid keeps its place in this ecosystem, provided it finances its construction rather than replacing it.
Private investment follows the same rule. On 25 September 2026, sixteen days after the cereal order, the Minister of Trade and Industry was in Paris for the France-Chad Business Forum, organised with MEDEF International. Around a hundred French companies and some two hundred Chadian companies discussed agriculture, agro-industry and livestock, among other sectors, and the Somdiaa group announced an investment of several tens of millions of euros in sugar.
That is good news, on one condition. The industrialist who comes to process our sorghum, our sesame or our milk will ask for two things: stable rules, and organised producers able to deliver volume and quality on time. A border that closes overnight will worry them as much as it worries farmers. The success of this forum will therefore not be measured by the number of memoranda signed in Paris, but by the number of Chadian producers under supply contracts three years from now.
Six commitments so that 2030 does not remain a slogan
They are addressed to everyone: to the state for the first two, to farmer organisations and their partners for the next three, and to donors for the last.
- Be accountable. Publish the voted and executed agricultural budget every year, and submit African Union Biennial Review data on time.
- Deliver on time. Set an enforceable deadline for every administrative act delivered to producers, open a complaints desk, display official fees at every checkpoint. Frame any export restriction with a set duration, published criteria for lifting it and prior consultation of producer organisations.
- Multiply advisers through farmers. Train farmer-relays paid by their organisations, on the Rwandan model, and complement them by phone: the agricultural call centre opened in April 2021 with the World Bank in Mandoul, Moyen-Chari and Salamat had received, by April 2025, 118,438 calls from more than 30,000 producers.
- Turn farmer organisations into service businesses. Advice, inputs, storage and group marketing, reserved for members in good standing, with governance rules that are written down and enforced.
- Back credit with stock. Develop warrantage with microfinance institutions, so that producers sell when prices recover and not right after the harvest.
- Change what donors measure. Active members after two seasons, the share of running costs paid by the organisation, and field yields, rather than the number of people enrolled.
We will apply the sixth commitment to ourselves: from the end of 2027, Job Booster Chad will publish every year, for the organisations it supports, the share of members still active after two seasons and the share of their running costs they finance themselves.
Judged on what we bring to the field
Doubling agricultural production by 2030 is possible. Cotton has just shown that yields can more than double in a single season when producers receive what they need on time. But this goal will not be reached with today’s institutions, and it will not be reached without them either.
It will be reached the day everyone, from the ministry to the farmer group, including those who fund and those who support, ourselves among them, agrees to be judged on what they actually bring to producers. Chadian farmers have already done their part. They look up at the sky every season. It is time our institutions gave them something else to look to.
Hyacinthe Ndolenodji is a social entrepreneur and Managing Director of Job Booster Chad Entreprise (JBC-E), based in N’Djamena. A graduate in sustainable development from the University of Exeter in England, a Chevening Scholar and a YALI alumnus, he has been supporting young people, women and producer organisations in Chad since 2019.
