The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded $11 million to the Food and Agriculture Organization as part of its ongoing support for a program that helps countries in sub-Saharan Africa develop more efficient food policies.
FAO’s Monitoring and Analysing Food and Agricultural Policies program, which has long been funded by the Gates Foundation, is housed within the agrifood economics division of the United Nations agency. MAFAP aims to reduce food loss and waste while also “scaling up investment,” “achieving more transparent markets and trade,” and creating “inclusive rural transformation” in eight countries: Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, and Uganda.
“The spike in global food prices exacerbated by the war in Ukraine … points to the urgent need to invest in agriculture in Africa.”
— Enock Chikava, interim director for agricultural development, Gates FoundationThe new $11 million grant is intended to help launch the next phase of MAFAP. Working with governments, FAO said it will use advanced economic modeling and other tools to determine whether food and agriculture budgets are ensuring food security and nutrition, as well as boosting economic growth. Economic models are used to predict economic behaviors.
“This new phase of the programme relies on state-of-the-art policy modelling tools that FAO has developed and are well documented in highly reputed international journals to ensure quality control, transparency and replicability,” said Marco V. Sánchez, deputy director of agrifood economics at FAO, in a statement.
FAO and the Gates Foundation have worked in partnership for more than a decade. At an FAO conference in June, foundation co-Chair Bill Gates spoke about the importance of using data and technology to meet the U.N. Sustainable Development Goal to end world hunger and increase the income and productivity of small-scale food producers by 2030. He noted the challenges inherent in that mission due to the increasing impact of climate change on the agricultural sector.
“Smallholder farmers are accustomed to overcoming incredible adversity and are constantly innovating based on changing weather and market demands,” he said. “But they can't solve this alone.”
The current conflict in Ukraine is causing disruptions to the global food supply system that underscore the need for increased investment in African agriculture, according to Enock Chikava, the interim director for agricultural development at the Gates Foundation.
“The spike in global food prices exacerbated by the war in Ukraine and by the sharp escalation of climate threats in many African countries points to the urgent need to invest in agriculture in Africa in a way that generates jobs, reduces poverty and provides everyone access to affordable healthy diets,” Chikava said in a statement to Devex.
Through this new phase of the MAFAP program, he added, FAO will respond directly to country requests and support African governments with data and analysis.
“This initiative aims to provide a strong foundation to support countries’ own efforts towards more resilient, equitable, and sustainable food systems,” Chikava said.
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A policy-monitoring component of MAFAP covers spending on food and agriculture “to help countries identify areas that are underinvested or that are holding them back in terms of food security and nutrition, generating employment and reducing poverty,” Christian Derlagen, an FAO senior economist and MAFAP program manager, said in a statement to Devex.
Additionally, MAFAP helps evaluate whether farmers and traders are getting fair and transparent prices for their products and whether those prices are encouraging them to grow and produce food, Derlagen said. All of that information is collected and posted on MAFAP’s data hub.
“It will also help countries to prioritize the most beneficial reforms first and help with policy implementation, no doubt the trickiest part of the policy cycle,” Derlagen said.
As part of MAFAP’s new phase, FAO intends to help countries better understand how their national policies affect the prices of commodities and products, as well as how to prioritize the policies and investments that will most effectively reduce poverty and create jobs.
Update, April 12, 2022: This story has been updated to clarify that a statement to Devex came from Christian Derlagen of MAFAP.
About the author
Stephanie Beasley@Steph_Beasley
Stephanie Beasley is a Senior Reporter at Devex, where she covers global philanthropy with a focus on regulations and policy. She is an alumna of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and Oberlin College and has a background in Latin American studies. She previously covered transportation security at POLITICO.
