The Monitoring and Analysing Food and Agricultural Policies (MAFAP) programme, an agricultural policy monitoring and analysis initiative within FAO’s Agrifood Economics Division (ESA), has been awarded a new 5-year grant by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, totalling USD 11 million.

The MAFAP programme has run for more than a decade, helping to bring about over 20 important policy reforms across sub-Saharan Africa on investment plans, strategy development, food and nutrition, regulatory affairs and trade and market policies, among other policy areas.

The programme has become a crucial tool for governments as they grapple with tighter budgets in the wake of COVID-19 and the impact of the war in Ukraine. MAFAP provides data-driven insight to guide reforms towards inclusive agricultural transformation of agrifood systems and wider economic recovery.

The third phase (2022–2027) will support eight countries in sub-Saharan Africa – Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda and Uganda – in making more informed, evidence-based policy and investment decisions.

“This new phase of the programme relies on state-of-the-art policy modelling tools that FAO has developed and are well documented in highly reputed international journals to ensure quality control, transparency and replicability,” said Marco V. Sánchez, Deputy Director of the FAO Agrifood Economics Division.

The next 5 years of MAFAP

Over the next 5 years, MAFAP will help the eight key partner countries, and continue to provide others, by helping to:

• determine if budgets on food and agriculture are optimally spent to ensure food security and nutrition, boost economic growth and speed up inclusive agricultural transformation.
• better understand how national policies affect the prices of commodities or products along the value chain.
• prioritize the policies and investments that have the largest positive effects on poverty reduction, employment, agricultural growth and the affordability of healthy diets.
• identify and assess policy options for reform, and successfully implement policy changes

To kick off MAFAP III, a high-level virtual launch event took place on 6 April 2022, which drew in over 150 stakeholders from agrifood development policy. Speakers included Máximo Torero Cullen, FAO’s Chief Economist; Marco V. Sanchez, ESA Deputy Director; Christian Derlagen, MAFAP Programme Manager and Senior Economist; Alan Rennison, Senior Programme Officer, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Chantal Ingabire, Director General of Planning, Ministry of Agriculture and Animal Resources, Rwanda; Ollen Wanda, Senior Planner Agriculture, National Planning Authority, Uganda; Rachel Waterhouse, Team Leader, Natural Resources, Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland; and Sareh Forouzesh, Deputy Director, Just Rural Transition.