With some of the world's poorest countries, Africa is a development priority for the donor community. A major drag on Africa's development is the underperformance of the critical agriculture sector, which has been neglected both by donors and governments over the past two decades. The sector faces a variety of constraints that are particular to agriculture in Africa and make its development a complex challenge. Poor governance and conflict in several countries further complicate matters. IEG has assessed the development effectiveness of World Bank assistance in addressing constraints to agricultural development in Africa over the period of fiscal 1991–2006.
Moving forward, agriculture has enormous potential to contribute to poverty reduction in Africa and the Bank can make an important contribution in this area.
About Sub-Saharan Africa...
Sub-Saharan Africa is a highly complex Region of 47 countries with 7 distinctly different colonial histories. It is also highly diverse, with more than 700 million people of at least 1,000 different ethnic groups. The Region is a critical development priority—it has some of the world's poorest countries and during the past two decades the number of poor in the Region has doubled, to 300 million—more than 40 percent of the Region's population.
Agriculture is a critical sector for the Region.It accounts for 30 percent of GDP and employs 75 percent of the population (Commission for Africa 2005).
Agricultural development in Africa is a complex technical, economic, social, and political challenge that has to be overcome if the Region is to reduce extreme poverty and hunger to meet the first Millennium Development Goal.
Given the diverse constraints to agricultural development in Africa, the strategy for the development of the sector needs to be multifaceted and to coordinate interventions across a range of activities.
The Bank has had limited success in helping address the challenges of agricultural development in Africa.
The Bank now has an opportunity, drawing on its comparative advantage as a multisector lending institution and as the single largest donor to African agriculture (during 1990–2005), to help ensure a coordinated and multifaceted approach to agriculture development in Africa.
Key Findings—Factors of Performance
Bank Factors
Over time, the importance of agriculture in the Bank's rural strategy has declined. Both arising from and contributing to this, technical skills to support agricultural development adequately have also declined.
The Bank's diagnosis of a country's development status and priorities in the agriculture sector is carried out primarily through analytical work, which has been limited, and has not strategically informed Bank–client policy dialogue and lending program design.
The Bank's policy advice appears to have had far-reaching implications for the direction of agricultural development in African countries. However, results have fallen short of expectations because of weak political support and insufficient appreciation of reality on the ground, among other things.
The Bank's data systems and support for monitoring and evaluation (M&E) have been insufficient to adequately inform the institution's effort to develop agriculture in Africa across a broad front.
Country Factors
Political commitment for the development of agriculture in client countries appears stronger now than in the past.
African governments, many of which were allocating less than 1 percent of their budget to agriculture, agreed in July 2003 at the African Union Summit to allocate at least 10 percent of national budgetary resources for programs to support agricultural growth in the next five years.
Considerable agricultural research capacity exists, although the sustainability of activities supported remains uncertain.
Recommendations 1. Focus attention to achieve improvements in agriculture productivity:
Establish realistic goals for expansion of irrigation and recognize the need to increase productivity of rain-fed agriculture through improvements in land quality, as well as water and drought management.
Help design efficient mechanisms, including public-private partnerships, to provide farmers with such critical inputs as fertilizers, water, credit, and seeds.
Supporting the development of marketing and transport infrastructure.
2. Improve its work on agriculture:
Increase the quantity and quality of analytical work on agriculture and ensure that policy advice and lending are grounded in its findings.
Support public expenditure analyses to assess resource availability for agriculture and to help set Bank priorities.
Rebuild its technical skills, based on a comprehensive assessment of current gaps.
 
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