Tackling rural poverty, together

African-owned and African-driven

Professor Richard Mkandawire

Administrator, Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP)
Agricultural Advisor, New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD)

CAADP gives Africa’s governments “a common framework” to harmonise their agricultural policies

Richard Mkandawire is a socio-economist and a rural development expert with a PhD. from the University of East Anglia in the UK. Both academic and development practitioner, he has taught at the University of Malawi, the University of Zambia, and in South Africa. Between 1992 and 1999 he was with the Commonwealth Secretariat as the Commonwealth Youth Programme Regional Director for Africa, facilitating micro-financing initiatives as well as the development of a wide range of livelihood initiatives for young people. Now based in South Africa, Professor Mkandawire works as NEPAD’s advisor on agriculture and is nominally in charge of driving forward progress on CAADP. He recently discussed CAADP’s progress with Timothy Nater.

How can African countries improve their current record on the Maputo commitment to agriculture?

We're confident that, by the end of 2008, on the basis of current trends, 10 African countries will have achieved the Maputo commitment of 10% of national budget allocation to agriculture. Rwanda, for example, has more than quadrupled its budget allocation — up to something like 20 %. Niger, Malawi and Mali are moving towards 10 %, and there's Ethiopia, which has always put considerable resources into agriculture. Of course, the situation varies greatly from country to country. For example, in those with large petroleum or mining industries, like Nigeria or South Africa, reaching 10 per cent of total budget allocation to agriculture is a different matter than in, say, Niger, where agriculture’s contribution to overall GDP is much higher.

But national budget allocation is not the only positive measure of Africa’s agricultural performance. Over the past five years nearly a dozen countries, including Eritrea, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, The Gambia, Senegal and Tanzania, have either nearly achieved or exceeded the CAADP target of 6% growth in annual agricultural productivity.

What progress is being made on CAADP's four “Pillar Frameworks”?

National governments need to speak with one voice to a common framework for the harmonisation of their policies, and our four CAADP Pillar Frameworks are intended to serve as guides. After two years of work, the Pillar 1 framework on land and water management is fairly advanced. There’s been a significant commitment of resources to this by the international community, notably $150 million dollars from the Global Environmental Facility for supporting sustainable land management under the TerrAfrica initiative, launched in 2005 to fight desertification and land degradation. The TerrAfrica initiative has leveraged an additional $1 billion as investment financing to support the scaling up of sustainable land and water management practices in Africa.

The other framework that has seen the most progress is Pillar 4 or agricultural research, technology transfer and adoption, known as the Framework for Africa Agriculture Productivity (FAAP) and led by the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA). A number of African countries are starting to base policy on FAAP and the development community, including the World Bank, the EC and DFID, is already committing very substantial resources to sub-regional research organisations like CORAF/WECARD and ASARECA for Western, Central and Eastern Africa, as a basis for increasing agricultural productivity.

Pillar 2 for market access and food supply, and Pillar 3, the development of rural infrastructure, are still not fully developed. Negotiations are now taking place across Africa on agribusiness and value chain development. The Pillar 2 and 3 framework documents should be ready by July 2008 for endorsement by African ministers of agriculture.