One Acre Fund field officer Edelquinne Munoko trains farmers how to space and measure their maize and bean intercropped fields for maximum yields. Credit: Hailey Tucker/One Acre Fund.
On March 30, the Council launched a new report, Stability in the 21st Century: Global Food Security for Peace and Prosperity, at the Global Food Security Symposium 2017. Each week, we've highlighted one of the report’s recommendations on the Global Food for Thought blog. Check out the final post in our series, and join in the discussion using #GlobalAg.
Leaders in low-income countries understand that growth of the agriculture sector is a primary path to improved health, prosperity, and well-being. However, in some countries, governments often underinvest in their own agricultural systems and policies, significantly hampering the potential of development assistance to trigger long-term change and often making private-sector investment difficult or impractical.
Any US-led program to advance food and nutrition security is transitional by its very nature. Ultimately, national governments must be able and willing to carry the mantle of maintaining a strong agricultural sector and nourishing their population. But their ability to do so will depend on support and partnership with the United States today, with the United States holding countries accountable to their own commitments and program outcomes.
Going forward, the US government should encourage and use mechanisms to stimulate greater government investments in these countries’ own systems as well as new mechanisms for accountability. The Council recommends that the US government, in strategic alignment with foreign policy goals, ensure that US agriculture and nutrition assistance programs are efficient and support low-income countries’ capacity to implement responsible and effective policies.
To do this, the administration, together with Congress, should take several actions:
Strengthen the effectiveness of development assistance through strong commitment to monitoring, learning, and evaluation for accountability.
Effective development assistance requires rigorous monitoring and evaluation, which includes a focus on desired outcomes beginning from a program’s onset. Significant improvements have been made in tracking progress under US-funded development programs. This progress should continue, and other areas can undergo targeted efforts for improvement to ensure that US assistance programs are both effective and efficient. The United States should also support local agricultural research and adaptation of globally relevant breakthroughs, including through challenge funds, and strongly encourage national investment in agricultural research. Extension and education services should be customized for specific demographic groups to ensure that the information reaches those who need it.
To alleviate malnutrition in all its forms, countries’ nutrition programs must not only be strong, but also well-targeted for greatest effectiveness. The United States, alongside its partners within national governments, should strengthen nutrition programs focused on the 1,000 days from a woman’s pregnancy through her child’s second birthday—a crucial period that sets the nutritional foundation for the child’s cognitive and physical development. This period should be a priority for low-income and high-income countries alike, including the United States. Women’s and children’s nutrition also depends on numerous health, economic, and social factors. The United States and its partners should therefore prioritize programming that expands economic, health, and education opportunities for women, including adolescent girls. In parallel, they should strengthen programs aimed at childhood nutrition, with a greater focus on obesity and diet-related chronic diseases.
And, as youth populations become an increasingly prominent demographic in low-income countries, the United States should more directly define and measure youth engagement in agricultural development activities and use the findings to inform program design and evaluate success. The United States should develop and adopt an index similar to the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index to measure and monitor youth engagement, establishing a “Youth Empowerment in Agriculture Index.”
Build national governments’ capacity to prioritize, implement, manage, and measure their agricultural and nutrition policies, strategies, and goals for long-term effectiveness.
For long-term sustainability and success, country ownership is the immutable goal of US global food and nutrition security efforts. The administration should ensure that monitoring and evaluation of programs in Feed the Future focus countries continue through the completion of their respective compacts to inform national planning and continuous improvement of efforts to advance food and nutrition security. The United States should provide technical assistance to help build countries’ capacity to meet key national nutrition targets. The United States should also encourage governments to develop agriculture and nutrition policies not only with the ministries of agriculture and health, but also of commerce, industry, energy, environment, and water.
More broadly, the United States should help governments strengthen their capabilities to hold themselves and each other accountable. For example, “scorecard” mechanisms such as the one under development by the AU can measure nations’ progress on nutrition and agricultural development and provide a useful and effective mechanism for national governments to hold each other accountable to their commitments to agricultural development and food and nutrition security.
The United States should support the strengthening of key national government efforts, including extension services, research systems, land governance and titling, water and energy infrastructure investment, evidence-based policymaking, policy evaluation, and finance as well as cooperation among these efforts. The United States should work with governments to continue to mobilize additional domestic revenues and, where appropriate, to allocate more domestic funding to agriculture, nutrition, and other food security– related issues. And, the United States should condition some of its development assistance on strong commitment to and national investment in agriculture and nutrition to ensure effective, responsible, and sustainable programs.