Sub-theme 1: Accelerated action toward results geared Malabo-compliant NAIPs
The first Malabo Commitment expresses a recommitment to the principles and values of CAADP, prime among which is the use of partnerships and alliances to support country implementation in a coordinated and harmonized way. CAADP was conceived to be the strategic framework that guides country investment and partnerships in the agricultural sector. The two key words “Investment” and “Partnership”, therefore, are the essential and distinguishing imperatives in the framework. The National Agricultural Investment Plan (NAIP) is the single, essential instrument for unlocking the potential of agriculture to achieve multiple economic gains, attaining food sovereignty and improving nutrition. For this to happen, the seven Malabo Commitments need to be translated into strategies, objectives, expected outputs, outcomes, and activities, and then integrated into the new generation of NAIPs and their budgets. This means any new NAIP should, as a matter of necessity, take into consideration the following:
a) Adoption of the principles, values and guidelines to ensure that the NAIP pursues the six percent annual growth of the agriculture sector and positions it as the lever for overall national development agenda;
b) Mobilization of domestic financial resources to fund the agriculture sector, particularly from national budgetary allocations based on the Malabo commitment of a minimum of 10% to the sector, as well as catalysing private sector investment and financing of the sector and mobilizing public-private partnerships;
c) Pursuit of the ending hunger by 2025 goal with particular emphasis on increasing inputs, capacities and technical resources for doubling agricultural production, investment in agricultural value chains, and targeting the vulnerable populations with integrated social protection in agriculture packages and integrating proven activities for improving nutrition, among others;
d) Poverty reduction with particular exploitation of instruments investing in at least five (5) priority agricultural commodity value chains with strong linkage to smallholder agriculture, creating job opportunities for at least 30% of the youth in agricultural value chains, and facilitating initiatives for attracting and sustaining women and youth in agri-business;
e) Utilization of research and available evidence for modernizing farming, production systems and processing technologies to attract farmers and entrepreneurs, ranging from micro- to large-scale, by scaling-up and sustaining capacity building and extension services.
The BR Report showed generally poor capacities for coordination, planning, implementation and fostering peer review across the continent. The absence of such capacity, explains why a significant number of Member States struggled or are lagging behind in developing their CAADP compliant NAIPs and had no reliable datasets for assessing progress. This situation needs to be reversed by learning from successes of countries that have institutional capacities and mechanisms for coordination of agriculture sector development programmes.
Sub-theme 2: Increased Investment Finance in Agriculture
The 2014 Malabo Declaration’s second commitment on “Enhancing Investment Finance in Agriculture’ came against the realization that most Member States fell back on fulfilling their commitments to increasing budgetary allocations to the agriculture sector, in order to stimulate the desired annual sector growth of at least 6% and achieve the ripple effect of growing the rest of the public sectors. The Declaration also expressed the need for supporting and facilitating private investment in agriculture, agri-business and agro-industries. Evidence has shown that countries that prioritized investment in the agriculture sector by injecting adequate resources into it, have reaped major economic gains and leaped-frog to investing in other areas, such as manufacturing industry, technology, transport and building and construction.
The BR reports so far produced still paint a grim picture of the continent in this area! The finding naturally provokes the question “What could be done better to spur increased investment finance to benefit the agriculture sector?” It is to be recalled that the 2016 (12th) CAADP PP focused on innovative financing mechanisms for the sector. An earlier event centered on “Making Finance Work for Agriculture”. Yet, there is still overall dismal resourcing of the sector! Could more experiences on good practices for influencing policy makers’ perceptions toward investment in agriculture, and presentation of cost-benefit scenarios, make the difference? Could a stringent high-level advocacy pay at the end?
The 16th CAADP PP will bring together a pool of policy experts and ‘champions’ to share experiences, lessons and inspirations that might generate new options and recommendations for new actions to inform AU policy organs and AU Member States. Certainly, radical actions and business unusual can make all the difference.
Sub-theme 3: Breaking the barriers curtailing progress towards attaining the goal of ending hunger
Projections that the African population is increasing exponentially spell out new economic, social and political challenges. One of these challenges is that competition for food is going to be high. This precipitates new approaches for intensifying agriculture for increasing food productivity and production. At the same time, there is need to scale-up and wide practices that have worked for improving food security and quality of food. Recent experiences from across the continent, Latin America and Asia, show that food insecurity and malnutrition can be reversed. Recent international dialogue forums on food security and nutrition offer recommendations on adopting food system-based approaches to planning and implementing national programmes tied with meeting the ending/zero hunger goal – SDG2.
Fortunately, food science, research and technologies are on the rise that result in production of nutrient dense crops. New opportunities have emerged for promoting nutrition sensitive agriculture. The current challenge is now how to harmonize and support these efforts and take them to scale. However, there are opportunities presenting themselves along the way. One of such opportunities is the EU-AU Food and Nutrition Security and Sustainable Agriculture Partnership and the South-South Cooperation Framework that are working to consolidate partnerships and used as knowledge sharing platforms in the fight against hunger and malnutrition.
Alarmed by the statistics and findings of several evaluations, including the two BR reports, showing that several countries were not ‘on track’ in terms of the “improving food security and nutrition” index, there is need for food and nutrition stakeholders to seriously dialogue on new practical approaches that are proven to have fast impact.
Discussions informed by this sub-theme will also be guided to cement a deep understanding of food system based approaches to fighting hunger and malnutrition in Africa. Conclusions and recommendations derived from such discussion, will hopefully lead to an African common position on transforming African Food Systems. Thus, they will become relevant to the forthcoming Food Systems Summit 2021, which has been called for by the UN Secretary-General Antònio Guterres. Worthy of noting, this planned summit aims to raise global awareness and garner global commitments for transforming food systems towards defeating hunger and reduction of diet-related disease and healing the planet. Focus has been set on the way we produce, process and consume food. The 16th CAADP PP will, therefore, provide an opportunity for this needed debate.
Sub-theme 4: Galvanizing inclusive agricultural growth and transformation to cut poverty in Africa by half by 2025
The 2014 Malabo Declaration came out with a firm resolve for participation of women and youth in agricultural investment along the entire value chains, to enable these social groups benefit from the growth and transformation opportunities and to improve their livelihoods. Likewise, the Renewed Call for Action to End Hunger in Africa called for promotion of agribusiness to create opportunities for decent jobs for the youth as a mechanism to address the root causes of poverty and distress migration. However, the BRR uncovered that only 19 of the 47 countries that reported had created jobs for youth in agricultural value chains, and that 16 of the countries had reported that women participated in agribusiness. This means there is still a chunk of work to improve on these indicators. Therefore, the actors on agribusiness development and planning (both from public and private) need to take the advantage of the 16th PP to critically examine scenarios, exchange experiences for lesson learning and agree on how to exploit available opportunities for reversing the situation.
Sub-theme 5: Unlocking the potential of AfCTA toward tripling intra-African trade in agricultural commodities and services
The Malabo Declaration’s call for tripling intra-African trade in agricultural commodities and services, heightened the preparations for launching the Africa Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). The year 2019 marked the birth of this organization, which is being headquartered in Accra, Ghana. The AfCFTA is a flagship of AU Agenda 2063 under Aspiration 2: “An integrated continent, politically united, based on the ideals of Pan Africanism and the vision of Africa’s Renaissance.”
On 12 June 2019 a side event was organized on the margins of the 15th CAADP PP which focussed on the theme “Operationalizing AfCFTA - Partnerships and elimination of barriers to trade in Africa”. The Ministerial Session of the 15th CAADP PP also set light on the AfCFTA. It was recommended that investment in the agriculture sector need to focus on “opening new markets for agricultural, livestock and fisheries commodities, in order to make use of the opportunity the recently launched AfCFTA has provided”.
The 2019 BR Report highlighted progress achieved by Member States toward meeting three indicators under the target of tripling intra-Africa trade in agricultural commodities and services, namely: Growth rate of the value of trade of agricultural commodities and services within Africa; (ii) Trade Facilitation Index; and (iii) Domestic Food Price Volatility Index. It is encouraging to note that twenty nine (29) Members States are on-track to meeting the commitment based on the aggregation of these indicators. A dedicated session of the 16th CAADP PP will feature presentations by a panel of experts to stimulate discussions centred on a) regional (RECs) and country experiences and lessons learned on facilitating cross-border trade in agricultural, livestock and fisheries goods, and b) scenarios for catalysing the AfCFTA toward improving AU Member States’ performance.
Sub-theme 6: Strengthening resilience of farming systems and livelihoods
Africa is overwhelmed with many forms of recurrent and structural humanitarian, natural, economic and social crises, including man-made causes of disasters epitomised by conflicts and protests, poor governance and corruption. It is for this reason that the Malabo Declaration made its sixth commitment to “enhancing resilience of production systems to climate variability and other related risks.” Evidence from the BRR shows that in 13 of the 47 countries that submitted their reports, are not on track of meeting the budgetary threshold required to implement activities lined up for boosting resilience to livelihood shocks and to climate variability. It is also reported that only one country (Mauritius) is on track with regards to household coverage by resilience insurance to make them resilient to climate related risks. The imperative from this finding is that Africa is simply not investing adequately in this area.
On the indicator “Budget lines on social protection as percentage of the total resource requirements for coverage of the vulnerable social groups”, only three countries (Mali, South Africa and Zimbabwe) met the 100% target. This finding, to some extent, indicates that efforts for improving provision of economic opportunities for the vulnerable are lacking and need to be interrogated on a case-by-case basis to understand the disabling factors.
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic that forced several countries to lock down their economies and social activities, prompted African Ministers of Agriculture to express the need for a concerted response to mitigate the impact on food security and nutrition and protect vulnerable populations. Coming in form of a political declaration, the ministers urged governments “to prioritize the food and agriculture system as an essential service that must continue to operate during periods of lockdown, emergency, curfew and other health containment measures.” Opening up domestic markets and borders to allow unrestrained flow of food to local markets has been reiterated. In order to translate these calls to action, the 27 July 2020 Joint Ministerial Declaration and Agenda for Action on the Impact of Covid-19, among others, calls on putting in place short-term and long term measures such as keeping domestic food markets open, encouraging market transparency and resuscitating food supply chain systems.
Discussions informed by this sub-theme will also set focus on priorities needed for improving African food systems as reinforced in the recent high level convenings. The Covid-19 pandemic caused a reawakening and rethinking of how resilient our food systems are. Some of the strategies for strengthening this resilience is opening trade channels and corridors, reducing food import dependence, and resuscitating the regional food supply chain systems. Also of late, high-level recommendations have brought to light development of strategies for promoting innovation and digital agriculture to accelerate food systems transformation across the whole value chain. Presentations will be invited from stakeholders and partners with interventions in these areas.
The PP will provide an opportunity to discuss the enablers, disablers and opportunities for informing future actions, such as in rallying governments, partners and other actors toward developing and supporting workable strategies informed by shared lessons and best practices.
Sub-theme 7: Strengthening institutional capacities, partnerships and mutual accountability and learning
The BR Report showed generally poor capacities for coordination, planning, implementation and fostering peer across the continent. The 2016-17 BRR establishes that only 12 of the 17 reporting countries are on track in terms of capacity for evidence planning and implementation and that 30 have reported to have conducted peer review and mutual accountability. The absence of such capacity, explains why a significant number of Member States struggled or lagging behind in developing their CAADP informed NAIPs and had no reliable datasets for assessing progress. Obviously, this situation has to be reversed in a number of Member States. The countries that have institutional capacities and coordination and mechanisms for coordination of agriculture sector development programmes activities, need to be used as reference points for learning from their successes, in order to benefit those that are still lagging behind. The CAADP PP will bring together agricultural development and institutional planners, CAADP process facilitators and mentors, as well as practitioners in monitoring and evaluation, to dialogue.
