MAFAP presents its policy monitoring work at African Economic Research Consortium

The Monitoring and Analysing Food and Agricultural Policies (MAFAP) programme was invited to talk about its agrifood policy monitoring work in Africa during a capacity-building workshop on policy analysis organized by the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC) workshop on 23 May 2024 in Addis Ababa.

The three-day, capacity building mid-term review workshop brought together around 30 attendees including 20 research teams from various universities across Africa who are part of the AERC-led project Policy Analysis for Sustainable and Healthy Foods in African Retail Markets (PASHFARM) project, which focuses on frontiers in nutritious foods research, the roles of markets, pricing, affordability and access to nutritious foods by households in sub-Saharan Africa and is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Given the synergies between the PASHFARM project and the MAFAP programme, Firew Woldeyes, MAFAP’s focal point in Ethiopia, gave a presentation on MAFAP’s policy monitoring policy portfolio in the region. Firew presented an overview of the programme and explained how data and analysis are used to understand the effects of domestic policies and market dynamics have on the prices that farmers and traders fetch. He underlined how the MAFAP programme is supporting countries to build systems and capacities to monitor and analyses policy incentives to the agrifood sector, using quantitative and an internationally recognised method that allows policymakers and researchers to visualize various indicators (nominal rate of protection, nominal rate of assistance and the market development gap etc) on commodities across time, sectors, countries and regions

He also presented MAFAP’s public expenditure analysis and methodology, which helps policymakers and researchers to see the level, breakdown and policy coherence of public spending on food and agriculture. Such analysis can also show how good a government is at planning its spending – by looking at the budget execution rate – and how a government spends its resources – by policy “instruments” (input subsidies, irrigation, R&D etc) – as well as on which subsectors, on which agents (producer, trader, processor or consumer), at which administrative level spending goes (central or subnational level).

Finally, Firew shared some real-world examples of MAFAP’s policy monitoring work helping governments to change or inform policy through data-driven insights, then showcased MAFAP’s data hub, and made attendees aware of MAFAP’s free elearning courses on policy monitoring (here and here).