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The Monitoring and Analysing Food and Agricultural Policies (MAFAP) programme seeks to establish country owned sustainable systems to monitor, analyse, and reform food and agricultural policies to enable more effective, efficient and inclusive policy frameworks in emerging economies.

Eliminating hunger by 2030 will require appropriate legislation backed up by the necessary budgets and proper monitoring, allowing a just and long-lasting legal framework to be created. The following are ten ideas for areas where members of parliament could direct efforts aimed at achieving Sustainable Development Goal 2 (SDG 2): to end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture.

FAO’s Investment Centre provides a wide range of investment support services to developing and transition countries. This first annual review shines a light on the work of the Investment Centre and its partners – the international financing institutions - carried out in 2017 to increase the volume and quality of investments in food security, nutrition, agriculture and rural development. During that year, the Centre supported investment-related policy studies and processes to increase policy dialogue and contributed to the design, technical assistance, supervision or evaluation of 153 projects in 68 countries. It increasingly linked both its policy work with investment support [...]

Social protection is the set of policies and programmes aimed at preventing or protecting all people against poverty, vulnerability, and social exclusion throughout their lifecycles, particularly the most vulnerable groups. This poster will serve to demonstrate the efforts - and advancements made - in reducing rural poverty and increasing resilience through FAO strategic programmes, such as SP3 and SP5 in recent years. It aims to provide to donors, partners, and policy-makers with the information they need to gain awareness of the impacts of social protection initiatives, and to invest in social protection as a valid pathway out of poverty and [...]

Social protection is the set of policies and programmes aimed at preventing or protecting all people against poverty, vulnerability, and social exclusion throughout their lifecycles, particularly the most vulnerable groups. This poster will serve to demonstrate the efforts - and advancements made - in reducing rural poverty and increasing resilience through FAO strategic programmes, such as SP3 and SP5 in recent years. It aims to provide to donors, partners, and policy-makers with the information they need to gain awareness of the impacts of social protection initiatives, and to invest in social protection as a valid pathway out of poverty and [...]

This paper summarizes evidence on six perceptions associated with cash transfer programming, using eight rigorous evaluations conducted on large-scale government unconditional cash transfers in sub-Saharan Africa under the Transfer Project. Specifically, it investigates if transfers: 1) induce higher spending on alcohol or tobacco; 2) are fully consumed (rather than invested); 3) create dependency (reduce participation in productive activities); 4) increase fertility; 5) lead to negative community-level economic impacts (including price distortion and inflation); and 6) are fiscally unsustainable. The paper presents evidence refuting each claim, leading to the conclusion that these perceptions—insofar as they are utilized in policy debates—undercut potential [...]

Many social protection programmes, including cash transfers, public works programmes and asset transfers, target women as main beneficiaries or recipients of benefits. Extending social protection to rural populations has great potential for fostering rural women’s economic empowerment. However, to tap into this potential, more needs to be done. There is much scope for making social protection policies and programmes more gender sensitive and for better aligning them with agricultural and rural development policies to help address gender inequalities. Recognizing this potential and capitalizing on existing evidence, FAO seeks to enhance the contribution of social protection to gender equality and women’s empowerment [...]

Sustainable Development Goal 1, ending poverty in all its forms, everywhere, is the most ambitious goal set by the 2030 Agenda. This Goal includes eradicating extreme poverty in the next 12 years, which will require more focused actions in addition to broad-based interventions. The question is: How can we achieve target 1.1 and overcome the many challenges that lie ahead? By gaining a deeper understanding of poverty, and the characteristics of the extreme rural poor in particular, the right policies can be put in place to reach those most in need. This report presents the contribution that agriculture, food systems [...]

With the aim of eradicating poverty and hunger, FAO provides countries with evidence-based policy support to design social protection programmes that are nutrition-sensitive, risk-informed and shock-responsive, and advocates to expand social protection coverage to poor and vulnerable rural people. FAO, together with its main partner UNICEF, has been generating evidence on the productive impacts of social protection in rural areas and supporting the design of broader rural development strategies  that combine social protection programmes and agricultural interventions.  This flyer presents success stories from Zambia and Lesotho, showing how social protection can change the life of rural people, lifting them out [...]

While international migration attracts most attention, since the late 1990s, internal and in particular temporary migration flows increased significantly in Senegal. These migratory dynamics, whose modalities have diversified alongside migrants' profiles and trajectories, are the result of the combined effect of population growth and underemployment, of a continuous degradation of the natural environment and of migration policies of OECD countries limiting international mobility. Internal migration largely comes from rural areas. This is indicative of a state of structural crisis that marks the agricultural sector but also reflects the low diversification of the national economy. The migrations flows reshape the national [...]