By SEGUN ISAAC

Caleb Osasona is a serial entrepreneur that wears many hats — publisher, creative artist, food security architect and Amazon best-selling author.

He has watched for a long time, how foreign media portrayed Africa, depicting images of starving children, struggling rural women. He found the narrative not just shameful, but unacceptable.

He made a vow. He would commit his life to changing it, so that no child has to go to bed hungry.

In 2007, he founded Roos Integrated Expo Limited as an consulting business, culture and lifestyle magazine. Years later, driven by Nigeria’s staggering post-harvest losses, need for public awareness and urgent intervention, he co-founded the nonprofit, Initiative for Green Sustainability (IGS).

His conviction is personal.

Raised by his grandmother, Osasona knew acute hunger and malnutrition firsthand. He watched her rise at 5 a.m. and trek 10 kilometers to the farm, every day. That image haunted him. It became his life’s work: to make staple food available, one home at a time.

His first major experiment was a network of farm incubation hubs to groom young Nigerians into globally competitive agri-preneurs. The first phase of that vision became ABAFEX — the Agriculture and Food Security Convergence.

Like a seed in luminous soil, ABAFEX multiplied.

The template has since been replicated across campuses and institutions, earning commendation from FARO-Kenya, the University of the Witwatersrand, the University of Nairobi, UNESCO, FAO, IITA, Federal Universities of Agriculture and other research institutions.

Before 2012, Osasona was named one of 100 People to Watch in Africa’s Future of Agriculture and Development. That recognition led to his appointment by the Forum for International Green Sustainability in Dublin, Ireland, to lead the Technical Appraisal Team for the Africa Man of the Year in Food Security Award.

For nearly a year, his team traveled across Nigeria, engaging farmers and stakeholders against a strict benchmark: investment portfolio, funding source, farm size and valuation, host community impact, and SDGs compliance.

Eighteen contenders were shortlisted. On May 1, 2014, the award went to Aare Afe Babalola — legal luminary, educationist, philanthropist, farmer, and founder and chancellor of Afe Babalola University, Ado-Ekiti (ABUAD) and its Industrial Research Park.

What followed was providential.

Babalola, a staunch advocate for functional education and sustainable agriculture, agreed to single-handedly fund ABAFEX for three consecutive years.

A decade later, the initiative — rebranded as ABA-EX — continues to break frontiers. Whether a formal Build-Operate-Transfer agreement exists between the proprietary owner and the institutional partner remains a matter for pundits. What is undisputed is its growth into one of the fastest-growing platforms embraced by policymakers, farmers and the public.

It is a case study in what happens when food security meets academia.

For Osasona, intentional collaboration never ends as a flash in the pan. It creates a measured, sustainable and profitable ecosystem.

Industry captains now hail the Ekiti native as a visionary to watch for his ability to turn a convergence idea into a pipeline valued at over 3.2 billion naira.

“The distance between a farmer’s problem and a solution is less than 50 meters if we bypass the lies told by data mismatch and embrace ground-truth analytics,” he told BBC Africa.

So what is the ace card for ABUAD and ABA-EX?

A prestigious private university that grows what it eats, on its own farm. That is bankable. When a university ranked among Africa’s three fastest-growing becomes its own first customer, farmer empowerment, profitability and scale happen at lightning speed.

Today, Osasona serves as pioneer chairman of the Society of Ekiti State Creative Artists (SOECA) and until recently was immediate past Director-General of the Ekiti Chamber of Commerce, Industry, Mines and Agriculture (EKICCIMA).

The multidisciplinary artist whose body of work has been exhibited in more than 13 countries has outgrown the starry-eyed boy who helped his grandmother on the farm. He is now navigating the complex algorithms that will define Africa’s future of food.