Africa Lead FY 2018 Quarter 3 Public Report

The program has traditionally contributed to the FTF goals of reduced hunger and poverty by building the capacity of champions — i.e., men and women leaders in agriculture — and the institutions in which they operate to develop, lead, and manage the policies, structures, and processes needed for transformation. The Bureau for Food Security (BFS) at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has established three priority areas of agriculture policy change: (1) changes in policies themselves; (2) changes in systems to formulate and implement policy changes; and (3) laying the foundations for the next generation of policy change. Africa Lead promotes changes in systems to formulate and implement policy changes in four ways: evidence-based planning, mutual accountability, coordination and inclusiveness, and policy plans/institutions. Evidence-based planning refers to the extent to which policy, legislation, regulations, and programs are informed by recognizable, objectively verifiable, and reliable sources and processes for gathering relevant evidence or data pertinent to agriculture and food security challenges. Mutual accountability refers to the extent to which stakeholder groups seeking to improve food security conditions clearly articulate their actions and hold themselves and each other accountable for achieving objectives and learning from achievements and mistakes. Coordination and inclusiveness refer to the extent to which government ministries, departments, and agencies that play the major role in structuring and governing the agriculture sector coordinate their efforts toward broadly shared goals, and the extent to which all stakeholders believe they have and actually do have a formalized and practical role in policy development. Policy plans/institutions refer to the extent to which policies are articulated, prioritized, and widely shared, and the extent to which institutions are organized, equipped, staffed, and trained to implement the prioritized policies and programs. This report covers the program's major accomplishments and outputs from April through June 2018, which is Quarter 3 of Africa Lead's fifth year of implementation. It highlights the support, facilitation, and training that Africa Lead provides partners to improve institutional capacity and broader systems and institutional architecture to manage agricultural transformation as well to promote the effective, inclusive participation of non-state actors (NSAs) in policy processes. In Senegal, Africa Lead provided organizational development to two government ministries, the Ministry of Water and Sanitation and the Ministry of Trade, to support the implementation of the Plan Senegal Emergent (PSE). The PSE is Senegal's national development plan, and many of the key initiatives and flagship programs support CAADP-related objectives in agriculture and food security. Africa Lead is collaborating with the Ministry of Water and Sanitation (MWS) to develop an internal management system and associated operations manual. Africa Lead also provided support to the Ministry of Trade to develop a strategy for the implementation of the PSE. The strategy aims to improve the competitiveness of Senegalese products in regional and international markets. Africa Lead is working with the Ministry of Trade to identify key areas for improvement and to develop a plan to address these areas. In addition, Africa Lead provided training to government officials and other stakeholders on the use of evidence-based planning and mutual accountability in policy development. The training aimed to improve the capacity of stakeholders to develop and implement policies that are informed by evidence and to hold themselves and each other accountable for achieving objectives and learning from achievements and mistakes. Africa Lead's activities promote and sustain a culture of learning and continue to build a process by which evidence can play a greater role in determining policy directions and programs in agriculture. By design, Africa Lead activities are demand-driven, and the project serves as a flexible mechanism to support various USAID initiatives at the mission and continental level. Africa Lead is truly greater than the sum of its parts; to appreciate its full impact, individual activities must be viewed within the context of the continent-wide goals that drive them.