Binta is the Regional Goodwill Ambassador for Africa for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and she put a case in writing in October, 2026. It comes down to one sentence: “Simply put, women are foundational to Africa’s food systems and food culture.”
“Food was not something we took for granted,” Chef Fatmata Binta writes, and the rest of her argument is about who gets paid for making sure of it.
The part that turns that from a compliment into a line item is the FAO’s own arithmetic. Closing the gender gaps in farm productivity and in wages across sub-Saharan Africa would add 53 billion dollars to the region’s economy, the organization estimates, and would cut food insecurity by nearly 4 percent.
Fifty three billion dollars is not aid. It is the size of what is currently being left on the ground because the women doing the work are farming smaller plots, with less credit, less seed and less equipment than the men beside them, and being paid less for what comes off it.
There is a version of this argument that asks for gratitude, and Binta does not write it. She writes about a childhood where food was attended to, and then about an institution’s estimate of what attending to it is worth. A chef is an unusual person to be making an investment case. She is also exactly the right one, because she is downstream of every one of those plots.
The ask is not complicated. Fund the women who are already feeding the continent, at the scale the work is actually worth.
