MAFAP team meets Nigeria’s Minister of State for Agriculture and Food Security to strengthen ties on policy engagement

FAO’s Monitoring and Analysing Food and Agricultural Policies (MAFAP) programme is picking up the pace in Nigeria following a series of high-level meetings in Abuja, including a ministerial meeting with the Minister of State for Agriculture and Food Security (FMAFS), and several meetings with UN officials, and the heads of the country offices of the World Food Programme (WFP) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), and with colleagues in the FAO in Nigeria Office.

Taking talks to the highest levels, the MAFAP team in Nigeria – Manson Nwafor and Jean-Philippe Lodugnon-Harding, together with Deputy Director for Agrifood Economics and Policy Marco V. Sánchez, held a trilateral meeting with the H.E. Senator Aliyu Sabi Abdullahi, Minister of State for Agriculture and Food Security, alongside the FAO Representative a.i. in Nigeria, Koffy Dominique Kouacou.

The State Minister, welcome the MAFAP team and was “deeply grateful for the collaborative efforts” for the analysis on federal public spending and commodity price incentives. He added, MAFAP’s “unwavering support and expertise have been instrumental in driving forward this critical work”.

The rest turned to MAFAP’s new policy optimization modelling tool, and the preliminary results run on optimizing federal spending on food and agriculture. Senator Abdullahi expressed gratitude for the work done in applying such a modern tool to support policymaking in the sector and called for further work to better guide the government. “With [MAFAP’s] invaluable contributions, we stand poised to delve into the findings and chart a course towards impactful recommendations that will shape the future of agricultural policy and foster sustainable development”, he concluded.

UN Resident Coordinator

The MAFAP team and FAO Representative a.i. in Nigeria then continued their mission meetings, and met with the UN Resident Coordinator in Nigeria, Mohamed Malick Fall, who is the highest-ranking UN representative at the country level, in charge of leading the UN teams in Nigeria and coordinating UN support for the 2030 Agenda. They discussed how FAO and its MAFAP programme can be a key player in generating evidence-based material for policy decisions to transform Nigeria’s agrifood system and address the current food insecurity situation.

MAFAP in Nigeria team met with the WFP Country Director, David Stevenson, and IFAD Country Director, Dede Ahoefa Ekoue, in Nigeria to familiarize them with MAFAP’s agrifood policy support in Nigeria and several other countries across sub-Saharan Africa.

The MAFAP team in Nigeria thanks the FAO Representative a.i. in Nigeria, Koffy Dominique Kouacou and his team, for helping facilitate the mission meetings and for his commitment to the programme and its activities.

Joint Nigeria-FAO policy workshop

The series of meetings took place in the days leading up to a joint MAFAP-FMAFS policy-engagement workshop, where the MAFAP team presented updated findings on federal spending on food and agriculture in Nigeria and new results from an analysis of price incentives for 5 key commodities. The workshop, attended by over 35 officials, also served as an occasion to showcase MAFAP’s policy optimization tool, which was followed by a lively discussion on its potential in policymaking in Nigeria.