Since 2003, African governments have made the same promise three times. In Maputo, in Malabo, and now in Kampala, heads of state have pledged to put at least 10 percent of their national budgets behind agriculture. Each time, the continent has fallen short — and each time, part of the reason has been that nobody could quite agree on what counted as “agriculture spending” in the first place.

On 4 September 2026, at a side event of the Africa Food Systems Forum (AFSF) in Kigali, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) launched a new methodology, the Agrifood Systems Public Expenditure Analysis (ASPEA), built with the European Union to finally settle that argument. It is a modest-sounding thing — a classification framework, a common accounting language — but it goes to the heart of why two decades of ambitious continental declarations have struggled to show it.

A promise the continent keeps missing

The numbers are sobering. When the AU’s Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) last conducted its formal Biennial Review of the Malabo Declaration, only one of the AU’s 51 member states — Rwanda — was found to be on track to meet its 2025 commitments. Only four countries had actually hit the 10 percent spending target at all. A separate FAO review of 16 sub-Saharan African countries between 2004 and 2018 found that, with the partial exception of Malawi and Mali, none consistently cleared the bar.

It is not only a spending problem. The same body of research found that, on average, 21 percent of budgeted agriculture spending across the region went unspent — rising to roughly 40 percent for donor-funded projects — usually because of slow disbursement or weak project implementation, not lack of ambition. Around a third of total agricultural spending in the countries studied came from donors rather than domestic budgets, leaving national programmes exposed whenever external funding priorities shift.

In January 2025, at an Extraordinary Summit in Kampala, Uganda, African leaders tried again. The CAADP Strategy and Action Plan (2026–2035) and its accompanying Kampala CAADP Declaration — which took effect on 1 January 2026 — set out to mobilise at least USD 100 billion in public and private investment by 2035, lift agrifood output by 45 percent, triple intra-African trade in agrifood products, and reinvest 15 percent of agrifood GDP back into the sector. Crucially, it also reframed the old 10 percent target: rather than agriculture narrowly defined, it now asks governments to direct at least 10 percent of public expenditure to agrifood systems as a whole — the wider journey of food from farm to table, including the water, roads, nutrition and environmental spending that sits around it.

Why the measuring stick matters as much as the money

That reframing is exactly the gap ASPEA is designed to close. It organises public spending into four domains — economic, social, environmental and institutional — and classifies it as either agrifood-specific, when it targets agrifood actors directly, or agrifood-supportive, when it indirectly drives agrifood outcomes such as nutrition or environmental sustainability. It was launched alongside a companion instrument, the FAO Policy Optimization Tool (PolOpT), which helps governments model how existing budgets, not just new money, could be reallocated for greater impact.

“Today, we are not simply launching two technical tools. We are launching practical instruments that can support governments in planning, budgeting, implementation, and accountability,” said Meshack Malo, FAO Deputy Regional Representative for Africa, at the Kigali launch. He called on member states, the African Union, regional economic communities, development partners, financial institutions and research organisations to work with FAO to scale the tools’ use across the continent.

The two pilot countries in the ASPEA methodology guide make the case in numbers. In Uganda, a conventional agriculture-budget analysis captured just 4.3 percent of total public spending on average between 2018 and 2022; applying the fuller ASPEA lens — which counted urban water and sanitation infrastructure and a sharp rise in wildlife conservation spending, among other categories — raised that figure to 13.1 percent. In Mauritania, the equivalent jump was from roughly 9.3 percent under a conventional agriculture-specific measure to 17.3 percent under ASPEA, once urban water infrastructure and coastal and marine conservation spending were counted.

Neither country actually spent more money because of the new methodology. What changed was the government’s ability to see what it was already spending, and where.

An early adopter, and a cautious note

Rwanda, as AFSF 2026 host, moved fastest: its Minister of Agriculture and Animal Resources, Telesphore Ndabamenye, validated the results of FAO’s PolOpT analysis for the country this same week and approved the tool for national use, with results expected to be shared with the Office of the Prime Minister and the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning. PolOpT has also already been applied in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Mozambique, Nigeria and Uganda, with Nigeria using the analysis to inform more than a third of the budget allocation in its National Agrifood Systems Investment Plan for 2026–2027.

A fair editorial has to note the limits, too. ASPEA has so far been fully pilot-tested in only two countries, and a classification framework, however well designed, cannot by itself fix the disbursement failures, donor dependency, or political drift that have undermined the Maputo and Malabo targets for twenty years. Adoption is voluntary, and the hardest part — getting finance ministries across 54 countries to actually use a shared framework, consistently, year after year — still lies ahead. A number on a spreadsheet has never yet fed a farmer.

Why this should matter to every finance ministry watching Kampala’s target

But the case for trying is strong. Twenty-two years into a promise Africa keeps renewing and keeps missing, one of the quieter reasons has been that governments, donors and researchers have rarely been counting the same thing. A common, internationally comparable way to answer the simple question — how much are we actually spending on our food system, and on what — is not a substitute for political will or better disbursement. But it is the precondition for any honest conversation about either. As the Kampala CAADP Declaration’s ten-year clock now runs, that may turn out to be the most consequential thing launched in Kigali all week.

Sources: Agrifood Systems Public Expenditure Analysis – Methodology and classification framework, FAO, 2026; FAO/APO Group press release, 4 September 2026; African Union, Kampala CAADP Declaration and CAADP Strategy and Action Plan 2026–2035; FAO, Unlocking public expenditure to transform agrifood systems in sub-Saharan Africa (2022); Farming First / Welthungerhilfe, Meeting the Malabo Target.