Investing in African Agriculture to Halve Poverty by 2015

The Regional Strategic Analysis and Knowledge Support System (ReSAKSS) is an Africa-wide network of regional nodes supporting the Common Market of Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC), in collaboration with the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the Africa-based centers of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), to facilitate the implementation of AU/NEPAD’s Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP). The ReSAKSS nodes offer high-quality analyses to improve policymaking, track progress, document success, and derive lessons for the implementation of the CAADP agenda. The goal of the ReSAKSS Working Paper series is to provide timely access to results of preliminary research and data analysis that relate directly to strengthening ongoing discussions and critical commentaries on the future direction of African agriculture and rural development.

This paper proposes a simple methodology to estimate the agricultural spending that will be required to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of halving poverty by 2015 (MDG1) in 30 sub-Saharan African countries. This method uses growth-poverty and growth-expenditure elasticities to estimate the financial resources required to meet the MDG1, considering both the direct and indirect impacts of agricultural spending on poverty reduction. The paper attempts to address a key knowledge gap by improving estimation of MDG costs at both the regional and country levels.