Advocating for Agricultural Development

The project focuses on six countries: Ghana, Mali, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and Malawi. In each country, TrustAfrica is working with local partners to assess organisational needs and opportunities, provide grants, conduct capacity-building workshops, provide technical assistance, and support peer learning. According to organisers, these activities will provide: reliable knowledge and baseline evidence about who is doing what where, strategic plans for concerted advocacy to make national policies compliant with CAADP, and a portfolio of grantees that are able to collaborate for greater impact.

Through grants and meetings, the project intends to enable advocacy organisations and other stakeholders to share ideas, develop and implement locally relevant strategies for raising awareness about the role of agriculture, and explore opportunities for building broad public support. Forging connections will also enable them to build alliances and coalitions for sustained advocacy.

Some of the specific activities of the project include:

• conducting a study of organisational capacity needs and strengths in each of the six countries;
• producing an electronic database of advocacy organisations involved in agriculture;
• convening civil society organisations to network and develop strategies for raising awareness of the role of agriculture;
• awarding small grants;
• providing technical assistance to strengthen civil society organisations;
• promoting dialogue and partnership building; and
• supporting efforts to monitor government commitments under CAADP.

Agriculture, Economic Development

The Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Program (CAADP) is an outgrowth of the July 2003 African Union Summit in Maputo, Mozambique, where 53 African governments agreed to make agriculture a top priority in national development. The programme aims to help African countries "reach a higher path of economic growth through agriculturally led development, which eliminates hunger, reduces poverty and food insecurity, and enables expansion of exports."

All parties to the agreement made a commitment to increase public investment in agriculture by at least 10 percent of their national budgets. They also pledged to improve agricultural productivity to reach an average annual growth rate of 6 percent by 2015, while paying close attention to small-scale farmers, especially women. The programme explicitly seeks to "develop dynamic agricultural markets within countries and between regions" and to "achieve a more equitable distribution of wealth."

To reach these targets, the programme calls for $251 billion in investments in four areas - land and water management, market access, food supply and hunger alleviation, and agricultural research - with half the funds coming from African governments. Only a few signatories have complied with the terms of the CAADP agreement by producing and signing a compact - and, according to TrustAfrica, even they have far to go to achieve equity and sustainability.