Gates Foundation extends $11 m to back agri-activities in 8 African states

08 / 04 / 2022

By Marwa Nassar - -

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has launched a new phase of agriculture policy initiative with a $11 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in order to support eight African countries.

The new phase of FAO’s key agricultural policy monitoring and analysis initiative focuses on supporting reforms in eight Sub-Saharan African countries, as they face an array of global challenges.

Covering Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda and Uganda, Phase 3 of the Monitoring and Analyzing Food and Agricultural Policies (MAFAP) program will continue working to support the countries in making more informed, evidence-based policy and investment decisions.

Among its key goals are identifying priority areas for scaling up investment, achieving more transparent markets and trade, inclusive rural transformation and more nutritious agrifood systems.

The program has become even more crucial as governments grapple with tighter budgets in the wake of COVID-19 and the impact of the war in Ukraine and seek data-driven ways to guide their reforms towards inclusive agricultural transformation and economic recovery.

“Global agricultural markets are becoming increasingly disrupted, leading to price spikes in food, energy, and increasing fertilizer prices, that not only hurt farmers and producers but also consumers and families, because of the lack of capacity to access food,” FAO Chief Economist Máximo Torero Cullen said in remarks at the launch.

To avoid a food crisis, he said “We must monitor what is happening and react with timely policies. We need double-dimension action: short-term to respond to these shocks, and medium- to long-term to achieve the 2030 UN Sustainable Development Goals. MAFAP is a highly effective tool to help countries to do that.”

The MAFAP program has run for more than a decade, helping to bring about over 20 important policy reforms across sub-Saharan Africa. The latest five-year phase is being launched with the support of an $11 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has been a longtime donor to MAFAP alongside previous donors the United States Agency for International Development, and the Governments of the Germany and the Netherlands.