Let’s be honest, 2026 has not gotten off to a very good start. It is hard to be either hopeful or optimistic about what lies ahead. But, faced with a choice between giving in to the gloom and doom, or fighting for hope and a better world, we, at the Shamba Centre, are choosing hope, without being blind to the realities evolving around us.  

Right now, we are hopeful about three things - some micro, some macro.  

First, governments and the development sector are increasingly joining forces to accelerate the provision of school meals for children affected by hunger and malnutrition. While this may not be a long-term structural solution, it does bring immediate benefits in the short-term. Indeed, nutritious school meals have emerged as one of the 10 high-impact intervention areas to end hunger nutritiously in our soon-to-be published report with FAO and CABI, as part of the Hesat2030 research consortium.  

There are differing opinions within the nutrition community about the evidence on whether school meals improve education or nutrition outcomes. In our report, we found that while school meals are more effective at improving education outcomes, they can also enhance children’s diet quality. How? By designing school meal progammes that offer fortified and nutritious foods, engage the community, and procure food locally. We look forward to joining this important debate and helping to ensure that new programmes are conceived from the onset to maximise both education and nutrition outcomes. 

Second, a new wave of agriculture and food actors are tackling the decades-old discussion of how to use aid more effectively to mobilize other sources of public and private finance. Multilateral development banks (MDBs) and development finance institutions (DFIs) are leading the charge. The World Bank has made a commitment to double financing to agriculture and small-scale producers through AgriConnect. But unless they are able to do much more with their capital, the hard truth is that development finance will continue to trickle.  

Three ways that MDBs and DFIs can make much better use of their capital would be through providing guarantees, investing in platforms and ventures to provide debt or equity, and paying for results and impacts, also known as outcome finance or results-based finance.  We, at the Shamba Centre, are backing outcome finance, because beyond just more money, we need better results to justify the use of precious taxpayer aid money to contribute to a better world for all. In the current climate, it has become even more important to ensure that the money deployed yields the greatest impact. We believe this can be achieved by paying only when the outcome is achieved, like soil health, farmer incomes, and cleaner water, rather than for activities, like number of workshops held or seeds distributed. Read here to find out why. 

But while additional and impact-driven finance is critical, it is insufficient when markets are dysfunctional, inefficient, and inequitable. And so, we are hopeful about a third trend – the growing recognition by governments, scholars, and international organisations, of the negative effects of power imbalances in agrifood markets on hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation. This problem of unequal market power is most visible in Africa where extreme levels of concentration reveal dysfunction and distortions across the agriculture and food value chain, from input to retail. 

We are thrilled to expand our partnership with the University of Johannesburg’s Centre on Competition Regulation and Economic Development (CCRED), to support competition authorities in Africa to improve their knowledge and capacity to intervene in markets and address anti-competitive behaviour.  

The world is changing rapidly. And so must we. For decades, we have had an aid dependency mindset where we focused on how to mobilize more and better aid money to solve the big problems of sustainable development: hunger, malnutrition, poverty, climate change, and biodiversity loss. Aid levels were never sufficient to solve sustainable development problems unilaterally. It is even less likely today. So, as we enter 2026, we are changing our mindsets to testing and accelerating market-based solutions that can finally lead to the end of aid dependency, without giving up on our hope in making a better world.