22 - 24 June 2011, Leeds, UK, by Colin Poulton

Africa College is a research partnership between University of Leeds (Faculties of Biological Sciences, Environment, Medicine and Health), IITA and ICIPE that aims “to improve the lives of millions of people in Sub-Saharan Africa by a sustainable enhancement of their food and nutritional security”. David Howlett (ex-DFID, now University of Leeds) seems to be a key link person in bringing the partners together.

Africa College research focuses on:

FAC’s conference held at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, on 21-22 June 2010, focused on the findings of the World Bank’s Awakening Africa’s Sleeping Giant report. This influential document argues that a huge area, defined broadly as the ‘Guinea Savannah’, stretching across West Africa with a second belt down to southern Africa, offers huge potential for a new era of commercial agriculture in Africa. Intensive commercial production in this zone, it is asserted, would be sufficient to supply growing domestic, regional and global markets. The report offers two models for agricultural development of this area – the Brazilian Cerrado region, focusing on large-scale commercial operations, and northeast Thailand, where a smallholder-led revolution took place.

Drawing on insights from existing work, plus wider political economy literature (often not specifically cfocused on agriculture), work in the next FAC phase aims to develop, refine and illustrate a political economy framework for understanding the sorts of policies and investments for agricultural development that are “politically feasible” in different country contexts.

Two FAC members (Blessings Chinsinga and Lydia Ndirangu) are involved in collaborative research on "Linking African Researchers with Adaptation Policy Spaces". This project aims to increase the ability of partners in Climate Change Adaptation in Africa (CCAA) programme in East Africa to understand climate change adaptation policy processes at local and national scales.

During 2007 -2009 the Policy Processes team conducted research in seven districts of Kenya (Eldoret West, Mwingi, Nyeri South and Rachuonyo) and Malawi (Dedza, Rumphi and Thyolo), to examine the role and performance of the Ministry of Agriculture at district level, using interviews with key informants and focus group discussions. The research explored stakeholders’ views as to the role that the ministries should be playing in different contexts, what they actually do and why, and what factors impede the performance of their roles.

The main activity of the Policy Process team during Phase 2 (2009-2010) has been additional field work for the Ministries of Agriculture district case studies in Malawi and Kenya and dissemination of the survey results on the Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) services from all study districts.

FAC recently published an in depth evaluation of the 2006-07 fertilizer subsidy programme. The evaluation, by Andrew Dorward (FAC and University of London) and Ephraim Chirwa (FAC and University of Malawi), assesses the impact and implementation of the Malawi Government Agricultural Input Subsidy Programme (AISP) in order to provide lessons for future interventions in growth and social protection. This follows on from a similar study covering 2005-06 by Blessings Chinsinga (University of Malawi).

A key challenge for the consortium’s work is to help develop policy responses attuned to local contexts. Politics are central to understanding context. As a consortium review paper discusses, a variety of different approaches to understanding African political systems have emerged over time.

Understanding policy processes in agriculture – or any other area – is not straightforward. It means rejecting the linear, rational policy model and embracing the complex and messy processes by which policy is understood, formulated and implemented, and the range of actors involved. It means asking how problems and policy solutions come to be defined, by whom, and with what effects?