The agriculture unit of the NEPAD Secretariat, in its mission to implement the CAADP programme, recently held a retreat to review progress and finalise a new strategic plan. The plan comes at an opportune time as the development community renews the consensus around agriculture as a key development vehicle and issues such as climate change sit high on the agenda. The basis of the strategy follows a close examination of how the agriculture team at the NEPAD Secretariat sees the progress currently being made in CAADP implementation and the major bottlenecks and challenges to making more substantial progress in 2008.
From this position, the team has identified five major strategic areas around which the work programmes will be structured. These include:
Partnership and coalition development at international, continental and regional levels;
Management of the "quality" of CAADP implementation at regional and national levels;
Managing communication and information in support of CAADP implementation and partnership;
Monitoring and assessment of CAADP impacts;
Harnessing key thinking and experience on African agricultural Issues to articulate perspectives and contribute to the evolution of the CAADP agenda.
The intention of the strategy is to help focus the agriculture unit on the support needed to contribute directly to the five points.
This will mean among other things, robust engagement with partners to move towards resource mobilisation; engagement with RECs and national governments in support of their identified CAADP priorities; management of a CAADP calendar and communications strategy; and pursuing new MoUs with the CAADP pillar institutions and RECs, outlining clear roles and responsibilities.
One of the first achievements of this new strategy will be the launching of a new CAADP Trust Fund with contributions from a number of major development partners. The fund will provide resources to support the country roundtables and pillar frameworks in realising quality agricultural investment programmes at the national level.
In parallel with the development of the trust fund, the NEPAD Secretariat hosted an interactive learning session on the CAADP Roundtable processes and pillar frameworks on 9-10 February.
The purpose of this session was to not only take stock of emerging lessons, but to strengthen the depth of understanding of these processes to provide a deeper consensus and a strengthened model of both the Roundtable process and pillar framework concepts. This is critical to ensuring the success and quality of both the ongoing Roundtable processes and those scheduled to launch in 2008.
A follow up meeting involving an in-depth review with donor partners of the current Pillar 2 and Pillar 3 frameworks was held on 11-14 February.
The meeting focused on the technical substance of the frameworks, and presented an opportunity to examine how successfully the frameworks are building linkages with the national roundtable processes.// Nepad Dialogue
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