Dr Jide Adedeji asked us something simple that I have not been able to shake. "What is the big question you are taking with you? What can be resolved?" One by one, my classmates stood up clear-eyed, specific, already halfway to solving whatever they had named. I sat with a quiet discomfort, because my honest answer was not a business idea. It was closer to a confession.
By the time a cocoa or sesame transaction reaches my desk as a facility, the real story is largely over. The smallholder has already decided who to sell to. The crop has already been harvested, dried well or badly, stored carefully or carelessly. The aggregator has already built or broken trust. I arrive at the end of a long chain of decisions I never witnessed, and I call my judgement underwriting.
The question I am carrying is not really about trade finance or better financing structures. It is about how much of what I call expertise is actually distance: the comfort of assessing outcomes instead of standing inside the uncertainty where those outcomes are created. Dr Jide's question was not asking what I am good at. It was asking what I still do not fully understand. If I am honest, that is it. I do not yet know enough about what happens upstream at the farm gate, in the conversations before harvest, in the decisions that determine whether a commodity eventually becomes a bankable transaction. Yet much of my career has been built around evaluating what comes after.
Maybe that is why I am here. Perhaps the work is not simply to become better at financing agriculture. Perhaps it is to become close enough to agriculture that the financing finally makes sense. I did not leave the classroom with a solution. I left with a better question. And maybe that is where meaningful work begins.