Influencing government’s planning and budgeting cycles- are you ready?

Food system financing is critical for shaping the pace of change and scaling proven solutions towards the desired transformation. Yet, its often mentioned that finances, and their continued flow remains a major challenge across all African countries, and globally. For instance, a funding gap of up to 350 billion per year by 2030 exits for transforming food systems to achieve climate mitigation and adaptation targets, and other SDGs.

African leaders recently ratified the Comprehensive African Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) Kampala Declaration committing to integrate six strategic objectives  into national agrifood sector investment plans and budgets. This mandates all countries to allocate at least 10 percent of the annual national expenditure to agrifood systems; and annually reinvest 15 percent of agrifood GDP back into the sector. The policy enabling environment is good, and now it time to ensure that these policy ambitions are realized in national and subnational plans and budgets.

As food systems leader, you can contribute to influencing and directing this change in various ways: know the planning and budgeting cycles in your country; understand the different financing mechanisms that can be adopted; nurture a collective diversity of voices and resources to influence decisions; and leverage created windows of opportunity to influence decisions.

Knowledge the planning and budgeting cycles at national and subnational level.  

A lot of preparatory work underpins the strategic multiyear and annual workplans of the ministries and local governments. Knowing when these cycles begin is critical to utilize the emerging windows of opportunity to influence agendas and ensure integration of actions that may contribute towards reshaping the status quo. Details about planning and budgeting cycles are explained here: for Rwanda and for Kenya.  

Understand the different types of financial mechanisms.

Agriculture financing is mainly from public and private sector sourced from either internal or external sources. Various financial mechanisms are leveraged to fund the agriculture plans. Examples include blended financing and impact investments, competitive grants and subsidies, patient debts and commercial loans, and direct institutional financing. These mechanisms are exploited simultaneously with sources of funding from domestic public expenditure, international development funding, credit from the domestic banking system, foreign direct investments, and foreign remittances.  See the elaboration from Kenya. Understanding the funding mechanism opens opportunities to lobby for different resources categories.

Nurture collective action for wide reaching advocacy.

Forming coalitions with diverse voices working indifferent areas is vital to reach different decision makers engaged in the policy processes. Leverage your collective voices to re-echo the urgency for increased agrifood system financing.  Your collective voice is essential to demand different types of financial instruments ranging from low-value and short-term to high-value and long-term. That is, tailored financial instruments for different categories of agrifood system actors.

By Brenda Namugumya