MAFAP team gathers in Rome with donor Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to chart path forward for 2024
The Monitoring and Analysing Food and Agricultural Policies (MAFAP) team met with representatives from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) at FAO’s headquarters on 12 and 13 March 2024 for a programme-donor retreat to take stock of ongoing work, learn about new lines of economic policy support, and to share knowledge, exchange experiences and challenges on agrifood policy engagement across MAFAP’s 8 main partner countries.
First up on the agenda was a review of the 20 ongoing agrifood reforms for which the MAFAP team is providing technical and policy support to countries in sub-Saharan Africa, 15 of which are in step 3 of 4 – in the engagement cycle, and 5 are currently in step 2 - the data analytics and analysis phase.
The team also had cause to celebrate and discuss the 10 agrifood reforms that the programme has helped usher in since the start of the current MAFAP III in November 2021, serving as lessons learned in public policy reform. This was followed by a session on MAFAPs newest work stream - policy prioritization, where Marco V. Sánchez presented the results of a start-of-the-art economic model that has been run for 5 MAFAP countries so far – Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Uganda.
The model calculates an “optimal” food and agriculture budget, revealing where countries should spend more (and less) and by how much on policy areas, such as seeds, extension services, mechanization, fertilizers etc, for key commodities to better deliver on four socioeconomic fronts for inclusive agricultural transformation (IAT): higher agri GDP, more off-farm rural jobs, poverty reduction, and affordable healthy diets for more people.
Four scenarios were presented – including optimizing a “neutral” budget with 3 of the IAT goals taken into account, a neutral budget with all 4 IAT goals, a 10% budget increase with 3 IAT goals, and finally a 10% budget increase with all 4 IAT objectives.
The afternoon on day 1 was then dedicated to another new and novel approach to track the extent to which public expenditure on food and agricultural subsectors and policy priority areas have been adequately planned (i.e. budgeted) and implemented in practice to support specific IAT policy objectives. This work falls under MAFAP’s policy planning and implementation tracking support to better show countries any potential gaps between budgeted spending, progress, and what is needed to reach IAT targets.
The second day of the retreat was entirely devoted to debriefing MAFAP activities and engagement at country level, with 7 of the programme’s country focal points delivering presentations on the status of the 20 ongoing policy reforms, as well as a wider discussion on policy engagement, policy cycles and addressing common and country-specific challenges.
In addition to discussing policy reform at country level, an afternoon session washeld to take stock of policy monitoring activities, a core pillar of MAFAP support. Steady progress has been made, with new commodities included in the price incentives data hub such as dairy, cattle, honey and onion for a number of countries. Fresh updates have also been made for data on public expenditure for Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, and Uganda, with reviews ongoing for the remaining 4 MAFAP partner countries – Burkina Faso, Kenya, Mozambique, and Rwanda.
Regarding communications, the new MAFAP website was presented to the team to gather feedback, and will include more details on MAFAP’s agrifood reforms in the shape of success stories.