Kigali, Rwanda, 4 September 2026

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) launched a new methodology on 4 September 2026, at a side event of the Africa Food Systems Forum (AFSF) in Kigali, Rwanda, designed to give governments a common way to define, classify and measure how much they actually spend on their food systems.

The tool, the Agrifood Systems Public Expenditure Analysis (ASPEA), was unveiled alongside a companion instrument, the FAO Policy Optimization Tool (PolOpT), which helps governments work out how existing budgets could be reallocated to deliver more for the same money. Both were developed by economists from FAO’s Agrifood Economics and Policy Division, the FAO Investment Centre, and the Monitoring and Analysing Food and Agricultural Policies (MAFAP) programme, in partnership with the European Union.

“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 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.

Why a new methodology was needed

In 2025, the African Union’s Kampala Declaration committed member states to allocating at least 10 percent of annual public expenditure to agrifood systems — a commitment far broader than agriculture alone. But most existing public expenditure tracking tools were built around agriculture ministries and farm-gate spending, leaving governments with no consistent way to capture spending on food safety, nutrition, agrifood value chains, rural infrastructure, or environmental management that also drives agrifood outcomes.

ASPEA is built on FAO’s long-running MAFAP methodology but widens the lens considerably. It organises public spending into four domains: economic (agriculture, forestry, fisheries, agrifood industry, roads, water and energy infrastructure), social (health, education, social protection, disaster risk management), environmental (natural capital, ecosystem services, protected areas, environmental regulation), and institutional (governance functions that cut across the other three). It then classifies expenditure as either agrifood-specific, when it targets agrifood actors directly, or agrifood-supportive, when it indirectly drives agrifood outcomes such as nutrition or sustainability. The methodology also gives governments a way to classify revenue forgone through tax breaks and other incentives that function as indirect support to agrifood actors.

For countries implementing the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) Kampala Strategy and Action Plan 2025–2035, the tools offer a common accounting language to measure progress against the 10 percent target and to see, in detail, where the money is actually going.

What the numbers show when the lens widens

The 96-page methodology guide, co-authored by Alethia Cameron, Atisha Kumar, Joanna Ilicic, Clara Picanyol, Nada Elberry, Eleni Stylianou, Valentina Pernechele, Paul Cathala and Béatrice Ngirabacu, includes two country pilots — Mauritania and Uganda — that show how much spending has been sitting outside the conventional agriculture-budget picture.

In Uganda, applying ASPEA to public spending between 2018 and 2022 lifted the recorded share of agrifood systems spending to around 13 percent of total government expenditure and roughly 3 percent of GDP — about 1.3 percentage points more than the standard MAFAP agriculture, food and rural development scope alone captures. Most of that additional spending fell under agrifood-supportive categories, led by urban water and sanitation infrastructure, which accounted for well over half of the expenditure found beyond the MAFAP perimeter, alongside a sharp rise in environmental-domain spending on wildlife conservation, driven by Uganda Wildlife Authority outlays. Uganda’s core agriculture-specific expenditure itself averaged only 4.3 percent of total public spending over the period — still well below the African Union’s 10 percent target — with the largest share going to payments to producers.

Mauritania showed a similar pattern, with the ASPEA lens adding roughly 2.5 percentage points to total spending beyond the MAFAP scope, again concentrated in agrifood-supportive categories such as water infrastructure, alongside nutrition programming and food-focused vocational and tertiary education.

The authors are careful to note that the composition of spending, not just the headline total, is where the methodology adds most value: it lets analysts see whether resources are reaching producers, consumers, infrastructure, or public goods, and where genuine gaps remain.

Rwanda already applying the companion tool

As host of AFSF 2026, Rwanda has moved fastest to put the companion PolOpT tool to work. This week, Rwanda’s Minister of Agriculture and Animal Resources, Telesphore Ndabamenye, validated the results of FAO’s PolOpT analysis for the country and approved the tool for national use, with findings now due to be shared across government, including the Office of the Prime Minister and the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning.

PolOpT has also been applied in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Mozambique, Nigeria and Uganda. In Nigeria, the analysis has already informed more than a third of the budget allocation for agrifood investments under the country’s National Agrifood Systems Investment Plan for 2026–2027.

A regional moment for expenditure accountability

The launch fits into a broader push at AFSF 2026 — the Forum’s 20th anniversary edition, held in Kigali from 31 August to 4 September under the theme “Investing in Africa’s Agri-Food Systems: Nourishing Nations, Growing Jobs, Building Resilience” — to move African agrifood investment discussions from pledges toward measurable, trackable action. For East African governments and development partners tracking their own progress against the Kampala Declaration commitments, ASPEA offers a ready-made classification framework rather than a new bureaucratic construct: one designed, the authors say, to sit alongside standard public expenditure analysis whenever time, data and resources allow a fuller agrifood systems assessment.

The full ASPEA methodology and classification framework guide is available from FAO’s Open Knowledge repository.

Source: Agrifood Systems Public Expenditure Analysis – Methodology and classification framework, FAO, 2026