How nutrition-friendly is Ghana's agrifood budget: A new analysis kicks off in Accra

FAO’s Monitoring and Analysing Food and Agricultural Policies (MAFAP) programme, FAO Ghana, the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC), and the University of Health and Allied Sciences (UHAS), hosted an inception meeting in Ghana to identify whether current expenditures in the agrifood sector are nutrition friendly. The workshop serves as the initial step before moving into the generation of scenarios to optimize spending in the agrifood sector for better nutrition. 

With a long-term goal of helping Ghana to optimize its public budget on food and agriculture so that more Ghanaians can afford a healthy diet without compromising output growth, job creation and poverty reduction, FAO, NDPC and UHAS will start collaborating on a series of activities throughout the year. These activities include analysing public expenditure data up to 2023 to then apply the SUN Movement budget analysis methodology and find intersections with MAFAP public expenditure classification to identify which agrifood expenditures are “nutrition-sensitive” and therefore count as a way for the agrifood sector to be contributing to better nutrition in Ghana.   

This analysis will serve as a foundation to carry out a policy-optimization analysis with the aim to better align agrifood public spending to national agricultural development and nutrition priorities. This will be done by  leveraging FAO’s policy optimization tool (PolOpT), an economy-wide modelling tool, to recommend future agrifood spending for better nutritional outcomes without compromising other development goals.  

The inception meeting, held in Accra at the NDPC headquarters, convened over 50 attendees from government institutions and development partners, to raise awareness about the importance of first understanding, to subsequently optmize the nutrition friendliness of  agrifood public expenditure for better nutritional outcomes, an emerging policy area that FAO is spearheading.  

The meeting opened with remarks from the Director General of the NDPC, Dr. Eric Akobeng (below),  Paulina Addy, Director of Women in Agriculture Development (WIAD) of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture and Agriculture, and Felix Darimaani, Senior Agriculture and Natural Resource Management Officer at the African Development Bank, as well as from Renata Baborska, MAFAP Focal Point in Ghana (final photo).  

The kick off meeting served as a moment to agree on objectives, methodologies, and expected outcomes of this project under FAO’s Flexible Voluntary Contribution (FVC) initiative, a pooled-funding mechanism that allows partners to resources to respond to development challenges in a timely manner. Participants also engaged in breakout sessions to further deliberate on their roles and responsibilities in data collection, analysis, and validation.  

Also attending were officials from the Ministry of Health, Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development, Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection, Ministry of Sanitation and Water Resources, Ministry of Trade and Industry, Ministry of Finance, and Ministry of Communication, the Ghana Statistical Service, as well as development partners, such as UNDP, IFAD, USAID, among others, and civil society stakeholders in the development and nutrition fields.  

Next steps 

Following the inception meeting, the next step in the project will be for the research team from UHAS to collect information from the participating institutions and classify the agrifood sector public expenditure data according to their relevance for enhancing nutrition.  

This work builds upon a successful nutrition-sensitive budget analysis carried out by the MAFAP programme and the Policy Studies Institute in Ethiopia, the report for which, Nutrition-sensitive interventions in Ethiopia’s agrifood sector – A budget analysis, is forthcoming and expected to be published in February 2025. 

Under the same FVC project, Bangladesh will join Ghana as the next country to also be supported in nutrition-sensitive budget analysis and optimization under efforts to repurpose agrifood policies to make healthy diets more affordable, in collaboration with FAO’s Food and Nutrition Division.  

Photos: National Planning Development Commission (NDPC).