Nineteen officials meet to sharpen skills at policy monitoring and data validation workshop in Burkina Faso

FAO’s Monitoring and Analysing Food and Agricultural Policies (MAFAP) programme is holding a four-day training and data validation workshop for 19 government workers in Koudougou, central Burkina Faso, as part of the programme’s line of work in strengthening the country’s capabilities to analyse and optimize its public spending on food and agriculture and on prices farmers and producers fetch for their produce.

The workshop, which is taking place from 25 to 28 February 2025, will validate key data covering public spending on food and agriculture from 2021 to 2023, and analyse data collected in late 2024 through field surveys with farmers and traders on farm-gate and wholesale prices and marketing costs across 9 key commodities (beef, cotton, groundnuts, maize, millet, onion, rice, sesame, and sorghum). 

The workshop was organized in collaboration with the Directorate General for Sectoral Studies and Statistics of the Ministry of Agriculture and Animal and Fishery Resources (MARAH), and brought together 19 bring national experts from MARAH, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Industrial Development, Trade, Crafts and SMEs.

Welcoming the technical and policy analysis support the programme is providing, Kadidia Doro/Dao from MARAH said: "The government's primary objective is first to produce enough for our population. In this context, the State, through certain measures, manages to support traders and producers so that prices remain reasonably low for consumers”. 

Photo: Left to right: Assistant FAO Representative in Burkina Faso, Ibrahim Ouedraogo; Ministry of Agriculture, and Animal and Fishery Resources representative, Kadidia Doro/Dao; and Ministry of Finance representative, Moussa Ouango.

Expected outcomes and next steps

Participants stand to gain a deeper understanding of MAFAP’s methodologies to produce policy-monitoring “indicators” that can reveal trends and recommendations for future policymaking. The validated data will help to shape a new Policy Monitoring Review (PMR) for Burkina Faso, which will dive deeper into the impacts of trade and market policies on farmers and producers’ prices, and assess areas to spend more effectively. The PMR will use the indicators to see whether policies are coherent with government goals. The report is slated to be published in Q2 of 2025.