MAFAP’s public expenditure support gains ground in Nigeria
The FAO Monitoring and Analysing Food and Agricultural Policies (MAFAP) programme together with Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (FMARD) held a validation workshop in Abuja in December 2022 to present to various government stakeholders the MAFAP methodology used, and economic data collected, for a forthcoming analysis on public spending on food and agriculture in Nigeria.
As MAFAP’s work progresses in Nigeria, the “validation workshop” sought to familiarize government officials and policymakers with the MAFAP methodology on public expenditure that the team of economists and policy analysts have used to classify and analyse the data that forms the basis of MAFAP’s indicators and policy recommendations.
The workshop was also a chance to gather further data on Nigeria’s biggest food and agriculture programmes and projects, and to discuss value chain expenses made by FMARD, in both cases to refine the classification of data collected so far by MAFAP, all in preparation for the subsequent analysis.
Attending the half-day workshop, which took place on 8 December 2022, were officials from FMARD (including The Director of the Policy and Planning Department and his Assistant Director, and value chain leads from the Department of Agriculture). As monitoring government spending on food and agriculture involves many institutions, representatives from the Central Bank of Nigeria, the Office of the Auditor General for the Federation, and the National Bureau of Statistics attended the workshop and provided valuable inputs.
Following on from the workshop, the MAFAP team will review and clean the data collected and will be used to produce policy monitoring "indicators". A Policy Monitoring Review report, which will include a chapter on public spending, is scheduled for publication in Spring 2023.
Public expenditure analysis is a core pillar of the policy support provided by the MAFAP programme and is part of the suite of work for Nigeria recently announced in September 2022.