The Future Agricultures Consortium is an Africa-based alliance of research organisations seeking to provide timely, high-quality and independent information and advice to improve agricultural policy and practice in Africa.
Through a network of over 90 researchers across the region and around the world, we are showing how agricultural policy in Africa can help to reduce poverty and strengthen agricultural growth.
Our research and analysis focuses on the political economy of agricultural policy processes in Africa
– critically examining how and why decisions are made, the condition for change, and the practical and policy challenges of establishing and sustaining pro-poor agricultural growth.
The Consortium in collaboration with Southern partners will begin work on three country clusters:
- Southern Africa: focusing on Malawi
- Horn of Africa: focusing on Ethiopia
- East Africa: focusing on Kenya
Country-level work will involve several stages and outputs, including:
- Background work: completion and production of scoping papers
- Constraints analysis in different sites in the country to identify constraints limiting agricultural growth
- Policy process analysis, exploring how agriculture policy is treated both locally and nationally
- Scenarios workshops: bringing collective information together to identify different scenarios and trajectories of agricultural and livelihood change
- A disaggregated assessment of the role of agriculture in economic growth and poverty reduction, highlighting potential impacts of different intervention options
- Identification of institutional reform and technology intervention options to get different agricultures moving
- Identification of policy blockages and opportunities for change
- Understanding of and engagement with the policy process to facilitate change
- Highlighting of emerging themes and issues for further investigation
