The African Union (AU) Heads of State are set to launch an agriculture transformation scorecard at the AU Summit to track the progress of Member States in improving livelihoods, poverty reduction and food security.
“The aim is that the Africa Agriculture Transformation Scorecard (AATS) will encourage performance across AU Member States, and also provide a tool that can be used by every actor engaged in agriculture across governments, the private sector and non-state actors,” said the AU Commission’s Department of Rural Economy and Agriculture (DREA) Director, Godfrey Bahiigwa.
The launch will take place at the 30th AU Summit, which takes place from 28 - 29 January, under the theme ‘Winning the Fight against Corruption: A Sustainable Path to Africa’s Transformation’.
As the first of its kind in Africa, the AATS captures the continent’s agricultural progress based on a pan-African data collection exercise. The data collection, which is led by DREA, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) and Regional Economic Communities, in collaboration with partners, has gathered data on up to 43 indicators.
“No other agriculture evaluation tool in Africa’s history has ever brought together the AU, all the continent’s regional trade organisations, the private sector, international development community and all African governments to build Africa’s agriculture and agribusiness markets,” said Bahiigwa.
The AATS tracks progress in commitments made by AU Heads of State and Government through the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) and the Malabo Declaration to increase prosperity and improve livelihoods to transform agriculture.
The AATS captures 23 performance categories and 43 indicators for each of the 55 AU Member States. The indicators chosen to track the performance categories were defined on the basis of the strategic objectives derived from the Malabo Declaration.
In the Malabo Declaration, AU Member States committed to report every two years on the progress in achieving the seven commitments of the declaration. The first report will be presented at the AU Summit.
Determination to end poverty
The Malabo Declaration’s commitments are:
- Enhance investment finance in agriculture;
- End hunger in Africa by 2025;
- Halve Poverty, by the year 2025, through inclusive agricultural growth and transformation;
- Boost Intra-African trade in agricultural commodities and services;
- Enhance resilience of livelihoods and production systems to climate variability and other related risks and
- Commitment to mutual accountability to actions and results.
In October 2017, Ministers of Agriculture endorsed the report that details implementation of the Malabo Declaration, which aims to accelerate agricultural growth and transformation.
In 2017, the AU Commission conducted and facilitated six training sessions in West, East, Central, Southern and North Africa regions, with 156 national experts trained, including CAADP focal persons, monitoring and evaluation specialists and statisticians from Ministries of Agriculture and other line ministries.
Almost all AU Member States participated in the training and familiarised themselves with the Malabo Declaration, targets and indicators, and the biennial review reporting format.
“The work that has gone into delivering Africa’s most comprehensive agricultural data set has been enormous but with this new tool set, the AUC has delivered on the Heads of State’s mandate to create tools which, when implemented, will take Africa’s economic growth to a next level,” said Bahiigwa.
In addition, five top performing countries in the implementation of the Malabo Declaration commitments will be awarded at the AU Summit. - SAnews.gov.za
