The Arab (Agricultural) Investment for Development Analyzer (AIDA) project develops an economic planning tool that will help governments and analysts in the design of evidence-based agricultural investment plans.
AIDA is a three-year project (2017-2020) that is funded by IFAD, with co-financing from CGIAR-PIM, and implemented by IFPRI and its partners with focus on Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Tunisia. This project builds on the previous IFAD-IFPRI-CGIAR PIM project "Decreasing Vulnerability to Conflict in Arab Countries through Rural Development". AIDA toolkit is built to assist governments in meeting this planning challenge, by developing a comprehensive planning approach with three main elements: an investment and policy analysis module, the AIDA offline Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model, and the AIDA online model. Several AIDA workshops were conducted by IFPRI between 2018 and 2020 which discussed below:
1. With the aim of engaging stakeholders from target countries in the project's implementation, a series of Country Focus Group workshops was conducted by IFPRI in collaboration with IFAD in Tunis, Amman and Beirut in 2018. The aim of these workshops was to present AIDA project to key stakeholders from the government, research institutions and development organizations. It also provided an opportunity to receive feedback from local experts, especially on the country-specific needs and characteristics. For more information, click here.
2. After the launch of the AIDA project in Jordan that took place February 14, 2018, a technical workshop was held in October 2019 for the validation of the key underlying database for AIDA – the new social accounting matrix (SAM) for Jordan. The workshop had 21 participants who represented many Jordanian entities, including: Department of Statistics (DOS), Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Planning, Jordan Investment Committee, Central Bank of Jordan, Ministry of Trade, and the Jordanian Hashemite Fund for Human Development. For more information, click here.
3. After four years of continuous collaboration between IFPRI and different institutions in Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, and Yemen, the final workshop series was held during the months of December 2020 and January 2021 to demonstrate the final product “Online AIDA”. For more information, click here.