IATP Policy Brief
The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) has been under fire over the last year after our research revealed that the billion-dollar agency had made little progress toward its stated goals of doubling yields and incomes for 30 million small-scale farming households while halving food insecurity. Since the publication of that research in July 2020, as an academic working paper and a related report, False Promises, AGRA has failed to provide evidence to refute our findings, withholding outcome monitoring reports after requests by African organizations.
Many hoped AGRA’s 2020 Annual Report, published July 12 with a companion report on “Emerging Results 2017-21,” would finally offer some evidence of its impacts. After reviewing the 66-page annual report and the 37-page companion document, I can report that AGRA provides some data but no convincing evidence of progress toward these three topline goals. The document confines itself largely to reporting not on its 15 years of work but its most recent 2017-2021 strategic plan. The evidence base for the reporting is unclear but it is undoubtedly thin; AGRA has published only one set of Outcome Monitoring reports, based on 2019 surveys.
The lack of accountability to its goals is particularly troubling for two reasons. First, the original endpoint for achieving them was 2020, which was then extended to 2021. This leaves African governments and farmers as well as AGRA’s donors – most notably the Gates Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), UK Agency for International Development (UKAID) and the German development agency BMZ – with no compelling evidence of AGRA’s impacts.
Second, AGRA is now formulating its new strategic plan; it has been drafted and approved by the Board of Directors and is awaiting an implementation plan. That plan will require new funding commitments, and anonymous sources indicate that AGRA will seek another $1 billion in funding through 2030. AGRA’s failure to provide evidence of progress means donors will be asked to continue their support without any assurance that such aid has been effective. As I wrote earlier this month, they will be asked to “throw good money after bad.”
I was asked by the U.S. Right to Know (USRTK), a transparency organization that has been tracking this controversy, to review AGRA’s 2020 Annual Report and companion document to assess whether it provides the kinds of evidence that have been lacking to date. Below are my findings, which can be summarized as follows:
AGRA provides no evidence of its effectiveness in raising yields, incomes and food security since its founding in 2006; in fact, it fails to offer any information about its first 10 years of work, reporting as if the initiative just started in 2017.
AGRA does report on yields, incomes and food security, but the data comes from a mix of sources, including “rapid assessments” in an indeterminate number of countries with an indeterminate number of farmers. As such, the data lacks validity.
The data presentation is misleading, clearly intended to cherry-pick success stories in selected countries and crops without even pretending to put such outcomes in a larger context.
Claimed improvements in food security suffer from these same deficiencies. The progress flies in the face of hunger estimates from a recent FAO report, released on the same day AGRA published its annual report. The FAO reported a jump of 44 million undernourished people in Sub-Saharan Africa to an alarming 264 million. The new AGRA documents are disturbingly tone-deaf about the dire and worsening conditions for poor Africans.
AGRA’s stated monitoring methodology is deeply flawed, ensuring that future claims of progress will be based on unreliable data collected on selected crops over too short a time period to offer valid results. AGRA’s inability to account for its first 10 years of work renders the organization’s claims of impact anecdotal and impossible to verify. As such, donors should reconsider their continued support for such a poorly run, unaccountable and ineffective organization.
AGRA's continued lack of accountability will certainly deepen calls by African farmers and citizen groups to demand AGRA’s donors reconsider their support for such an unsuccessful and unaccountable initiative. Southern African faith leaders demanded a shift in funding in apublic letter to Bill Gates, and leaders of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa captured their message in the headline of a pointed opinion piece in Scientific American:"Bill Gates Should Stop Telling Africans What Kind of Agriculture Africans Need."
As AGRA prepares a drive to raise an additional $1 billion through 2030, donors should do their own rigorous assessments of aid effectiveness. They should listen to Africans and shift their funding to agroecology and other low-cost, low-input systems. These systems have shown far better results, raising yields across a range of food crops, increasing productivity over time as soil fertility improves, raising incomes and reducing risk for farmers by cutting input costs, and improving food security and nutrition from a diverse array of crops.
AGRA’s continued failure to report accurately on progress toward its goals, and its apparent failure to achieve them, represent a challenge to the upcoming U.N. Food Systems Summit, led by AGRA President Agnes Kalibata. By many accounts, the summit is preparing to endorse a set of business-as-usual “innovations” rather than breaking with floundering programs such as AGRA to explore promising new strategies to achieve zero hunger by 2030....
(Read the full IATP Policy Brief.)