An Evaluation of the Level of Integration and Alignment of the Malabo Commitments, Africa’s Agenda 2063 and the SDGs in 10 National Agriculture and Food Security Investment Plans

This integration is also reflected in Africa's agricultural and food security initiatives through the 2003 Comprehensive African Agricultural Development Programme (CAADP). The CAADP seeks to achieve the goals of Agenda 2063 and contribute to the achievement of the SDGs. This commitment is set out in the 2014 Malabo Declaration on Accelerated Agricultural Growth and Transformation for Shared Prosperity and Improved Livelihoods. The African Union recently established a Biennial Review (BR) mechanism to support the implementation of the Malabo Declaration and hold countries accountable for making progress on the commitments. Currently, many African countries are revising their first five-year CAADP implementation plans and drafting their second five-year National Agriculture and Food Security Investment Plans (or NAIP IIs) in line with the Malabo commitments. This paper assesses ten NAIP IIs from the perspective of the indicator sets contained in the NAIPs against the BR, the First 10-year Implementation Plan of the African Union's Agenda 2063 (2014 to 2023), and the SDGs. The research was conducted in three steps. First, an assessment of the NAIP monitoring and evaluation frameworks of ten available NAIPs was conducted to determine the alignment between country NAIPs and the BR indicators, country NAIPs and Agenda 2063's First 10-year Implementation Plan (2014-2023) indicators, and country NAIPs and the SDG indicators with a specific focus on food security and nutrition elements. Second, the identification of novel and innovative practices and indicators and the establishment of where there are gaps that could be improved were conducted. Third, the insights gained from the analysis and drafting of suggestions to improve the design of monitoring and evaluation frameworks in relation to food security and nutrition components of development programmes across the world were documented. The findings indicate that the NAIP monitoring and evaluation frameworks were generally compliant with the SDG indicators that were directly related to agriculture and food security. However, they do not exploit the opportunities to align in the areas of the SDGs that address some of the core aspirations of the CAADP agenda – seeking to advance agricultural transformation to reduce poverty, inequality, and unemployment. Furthermore, a misalignment exists between the monitoring and evaluation frameworks of the NAIPs, the indicators of the BR, and the first ten-year implementation plans for Agenda 2063. Some countries adopted a more progressive approach to designing their monitoring and evaluation frameworks, resulting in a higher proportion of indicators aligned with the three indicator sets. The lack of appreciation of the full scope of food security (beyond production) led to an imbalanced focus on production by some countries. Malawi and Liberia responded well to interventions by the team and improved their indicator set. Country-level planning does not seem to take into account the international and African transversal sectoral frameworks in the drafting of policies, legislation, strategies, and action plans. The second highest performance area coverage was in resilience to climate change, but the focus in the BR on climate change meant the NAIPs neglected other important areas such as wealth creation, food security and nutrition, economic opportunities, poverty alleviation, and shared prosperity. The study suggests that the BR could be strengthened from closer alignment with the SDGs and in some areas, adopting the broader specifications in the SDGs could lend more direction to the BR indicators and the CAADP process in general.