A series of two- to four-day technical training clinics were organized by IFPRI’s West and Central Africa office (WCAO) in September this year at the IFPRI office in Dakar, Senegal. The trainings were delivered as part of the support that IFPRI and ReSAKSS provide to the African Union Commission (AUC) and the NEPAD Planning and Coordinating Agency (NPCA). The main objective of these training clinics was to support country efforts to appraise existing National Agricultural Investment Plans (NAIPs) and design new plans in light of the commitments and targets made by African leaders in the Malabo Declaration of 2014. This capacity building effort was important to undertake because the analytical work on NAIPs will be carried out by a NAIP Experts Group of African researchers, which has been formed to help national country officials in revising these plans. Participants of the Experts Group were drawn from leading African research networks, including the African Growth and Development Policy Modeling Consortium (AGRODEP), the Regional Network of Agricultural Policy Research Institutes (ReNAPRI), and the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC). A total of 41 experts attended the clinics with 7 women and 34 men. The training was conducted by Task Force members from IFPRI and other international institutions, who will continue to provide backstopping support to the Experts Group.
The clinics provided hands on training to the first set of NAIP Experts Group members on tools and methodologies for analysis in the areas of climate smart agriculture, gender, foresight tools, public agricultural expenditure analysis, regional trade, and setting agricultural growth and poverty reduction goals and country modeling. A second set of technical training clinics is being planned in early December 2016. In addition to sessions offered in September these clinics will cover topics in the areas of inclusive growth and value chain development, nutrition, mutual accountability, institutional assessment, typology prioritization, and tracking. Following the second set of clinics, the NAIP Experts Group will begin to carry out the analytical work for NAIP appraisal and design, based on requests from countries and regions. For more information on this capacity building activity and training materials please contact Julia Collins (J.Collins@cgiar.org).