MAFAP holds briefing with new director for agricultural development at Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

The Monitoring and Analysing Food and Agricultural Policies (MAFAP) team held a bilateral meeting today at FAO HQ, with officials from its donor, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, including the newly appointed director for agricultural development, Martien van Nieuwkoop.

The MAFAP team, including Marco V. Sanchez, Deputy Director for Agrifood Economics and Policy – the division housing the MAFAP programme at FAO – met with van Nieuwkoop and his colleagues Neil Watkins, Deputy Director for Global Policy and Advocacy and Ahmad Bahalim, Senior Programme Officer, Policy and Multilateral Engagement, for a briefing meeting on the programme, its activities and impact.

They discussed the MAFAP policy monitoring portfolio, in particular, data and analyses for public expenditure and for commodity price incentives, and saw how MAFAP analyses and policy recommendations have led to progress and reforms in a number of countries, such as in Rwanda, where MAFAP policy evidence paved the way for better investment planning under the country’s 4th Strategic Plan for the Agricultural Sector 2018–2024, (PSTA4)

In the same line of discussion on policy reform, they gave an overview of some of the +30 policy reforms MAFAP has supported over the year across sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia.

The delegation was also presented with a snapshot of MAFAP’s policy optimization tool, which optimizes current public spending on food and agriculture for higher agrifood GDP, more jobs, less poverty and healthier diets for more people. Results from the tool are currently being discussed at government level in several MAFAP countries.

Finally, they also considered possible ways to further enhance the economy-wide modelling tool and how it can be leveraged even further in the scope of agricultural development policy and advocacy at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.