Monitoring African agricultural development processes and performance: A comparative analysis

This report is primarily for mutual review at the continental level, which is a process that culminates in the CAADP Partnership Platform (CAADP PP) meeting that brings together representatives of the leading Regional Economic Communities (RECs), other regional organizations dealing with agriculture, major bilateral and multilateral development agencies, and private-sector and farmers’ organizations to review overall progress in the implementation of CAADP at the Africa-wide level. However, the information and analysis are presented for regional aggregates in a manner that can contribute to peer review at the regional level. Detailed data on country level trends are provided in the annexes and may be useful for those interested in the performance of a specific country relative to the performance of its respective region in the aggregate, or to Africa as a whole.

Given that the report is an outcome of the overarching CAADP monitoring and evaluation (M&E) system (see Benin et al. 2010), readers interested in more details on progress related to specific components of CAADP may look at the results associated with, for example, the individual CAADP pillar M&E systems, the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM), and the Mutual Accountability Framework (MAF). The pillar-specific systems, for example, focus on assessing performance toward achieving pillar-specific targets without necessarily considering how the processes, investments, and outcomes associated with other pillars interact with each other through complementary or substitution effects to affect achievement of the overall CAADP goals and objectives. The APRM focuses on assessing African states’ compliance with a wide range of African and international human rights treaties and standards. The MAF focuses on the commitments between donors and governments.

The rest of the document is organized as follows. In the remainder of this introductory chapter, we present the data and methods used in the analysis. In Chapters 2 through 6, we present trends in the CAADP core indicators. First we discuss the enabling environment to analyze the context within which the CAADP process and related policies, investments, and outcomes have been taking place—Chapter 2. Then, we present progress in CAADP implementation process, particularly the stages of regions and countries in the roundtable process—Chapter 3. Chapter 4 deals with the commitments and financing of the agricultural sector while Chapter 5 looks at agricultural sector performance, including productivity, growth, and trade. Chapter 6 rounds off trend analysis with a look at the progress that has been made in achieving the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG1) of halving poverty and hunger. Chapter 7 concludes with an outlook of the analyses to be done for the 2011 report and beyond.