VISION
News & Views

November 1998

Unique in the region, the networks are fora for conducting policy research, outreach, and capacity-strengthening activities—that is, they aim to strengthen capacity to undertake policy research in order to provide information that will lead to well-informed, and better, policies and decisions at the country and regional levels. In addition, IFPRI will help teams from each country develop the capacity not only to generate the relevant information, but also to strengthen their ability to package and disseminate such information and to feed it into the process of national decisionmaking.

Participating countries in the priority-setting workshops in East Africa are Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Uganda (focal country), with Ethiopia as an observer, and in West Africa are Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, The Gambia, Ghana (focal country), Senegal, and Togo, with Niger as an observer. In each country, IFPRI facilitated the establishment of a country team, normally made up of four to six people drawn from government organizations, research institutions, and nongovernmental organizations. In establishing the networks, IFPRI is working with regional organizations such as ECAPAPA (Eastern and Central Africa Programme for Agricultural Policy Analysis) in East Africa and SADAOC (Securité Alimentaire Durable en Afrique de l’Ouest Centrale) in West Africa.

Uganda’s Vice President and Minister of Agriculture, Speciosa Wandira Kazibwe, gave the opening address at the Entebbe workshop, and Professor George Benneh, the former vice-chancellor of the University of Ghana at Legon, gave the opening address at Accra. Then the country teams presented their country notes for discussion at the workshops. Workshop participants also arrived at policy research priorities at the regional level.

According to Per Pinstrup-Andersen, the director general of IFPRI, “These workshops will help countries generate the information needed to support policymaking in food, agriculture, and the environment. In this part of the world, where the capacity for policy analysis needs strengthening, the regional approach can allow for a great exchange of information, methodologies, and skills.”

The next step is for the country teams to present their country-specific policy research priorities to policymakers and other stakeholders in their own countries in early 1999.

The priority-setting phase of the 2020 Vision Networks for East and West Africa received support from DANIDA. The next phase is slated to begin in summer 1999.

“This process of holding priority-setting workshops, which was both consultative and collaborative, will add to IFPRI’s growing influence in Sub-Saharan Africa as an organization that undertakes collaborative work with national organizations, and thereby achieves greater impact on national policy planning and plan formulation,” said Sudhir Wanmali, IFPRI’s regional coordinator for West Africa, based in Accra, Ghana. “IFPRI and its partners in Sub-Saharan Africa now also have an invaluable opportunity to influence regional policy, which will be well grounded in substantive work based on regional cross-cutting themes and subthemes of policy research. These themes are fast becoming significant in the agendas of the regional organizations such as ECAPAPA and SADAOC.”

For further details, contact Sudhir Wanmali, IFPRI at Centre for Social Policy Studies, University of Ghana, P. O. Box 72, Legon, Ghana; fax: 233-21-500949; e-mail: s.wanmali@cgiar.org.

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