Kigali, Rwanda / Kampala, Uganda

Uganda’s public spending on agriculture alone has long sat below the African Union’s 10 percent target — but a new FAO methodology launched on 4 September 2026 at the Africa Food Systems Forum (AFSF) in Kigali shows that once water, sanitation and conservation spending linked to food systems are counted, the government is investing far more in its agrifood systems than the conventional agriculture budget suggests.

Uganda is one of two countries — alongside Mauritania — used as a live pilot for the Agrifood Systems Public Expenditure Analysis (ASPEA), a new FAO classification framework developed with the European Union to help governments track spending across the full food system, not just the farm gate. The pilot examined Uganda’s public expenditure between 2018 and 2022.

What the conventional agriculture budget shows

Using FAO’s existing Monitoring and Analysing Food and Agricultural Policies (MAFAP) methodology, Uganda’s agriculture-specific public expenditure over 2018–2022 totalled approximately UGX 6.9 trillion (about USD 1.9 billion) in nominal terms — UGX 6.5 trillion in real terms. When broader agriculture-supportive spending, such as general sector infrastructure, is added, total food and agriculture spending reached UGX 18.7 trillion (USD 5.0 billion), or UGX 17.3 trillion in real terms.

Agriculture-specific expenditure grew fast — at an average annual rate of 28.3 percent in nominal terms (24.1 percent in real terms) — though growth fluctuated sharply year to year. Even so, its share of total public spending stayed roughly flat, averaging just 4.3 percent, well short of the 10 percent target under the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP). Of that spending, 37 percent went to payments to producers, while payments to consumers accounted for a negligible 0.02 percent. On public goods, off-farm infrastructure such as feeder roads and irrigation took 18 percent, marketing, processing and storage infrastructure took 23 percent, and knowledge generation and dissemination — research, extension and training — took about 16 percent.

What changes when the lens widens

Applying the new ASPEA framework, Uganda’s total public spending on agrifood systems between 2018 and 2022 reached approximately UGX 19.3 trillion in real terms, or about USD 5.2 billion. That is around 13.1 percent of total public expenditure and 2.96 percent of GDP on average over the period — well above the narrower MAFAP figure, and closer to the scale of investment the AU’s 2025 Kampala Declaration envisages when it calls for at least 10 percent of public expenditure to go to agrifood systems as a whole, rather than agriculture narrowly defined.

The conventional agriculture-specific and agriculture-supportive spending captured by MAFAP still accounted for the bulk of this total — about 90 percent on average — ranging from 95 percent in 2019 down to 87 percent in 2021, when the newly-captured ASPEA categories expanded sharply.

Where the extra money is going

The single largest addition to Uganda’s agrifood systems total, beyond what MAFAP already tracked, was urban water and sanitation — averaging 62 percent of the additional spending, driven mainly by piped water supply construction and sanitation facilities in towns and cities. That share has actually been falling, from 79 percent of the additional spending in 2018 to 59 percent in 2022, as other categories have grown in importance.

The fastest-growing addition was environmental spending, particularly wildlife conservation, which jumped from just 1.2 percent of the additional agrifood systems spending in 2018 to 38 percent in 2020, driven by Uganda Wildlife Authority expenditure. Conservation of freshwater systems — protecting water resources used across sectors amid climate variability and land-use change — averaged a further 6 percent.

Why this matters for policy

The authors note that Uganda’s experience illustrates the core argument behind ASPEA: measuring only farm-gate agriculture spending understates what governments actually invest in the systems that keep people fed, and can mask real progress toward continental commitments. For Uganda specifically, the gap between the 4.3 percent MAFAP figure and the 13.1 percent ASPEA figure is the clearest illustration in the pilot of how far short a narrow agriculture lens can fall of the full agrifood systems picture.

A full MAFAP policy monitoring review for Uganda was being finalised alongside the drafting of the ASPEA methodology, meaning the country’s agriculture and agrifood expenditure data is set to be updated and expanded further as both exercises mature.

The ASPEA methodology was launched at a side event of AFSF 2026 in Kigali, where FAO Deputy Regional Representative for Africa Meshack Malo called on member states, the African Union, regional economic communities, development partners and research organisations to work with FAO to scale its use across the continent, alongside a companion tool, the FAO Policy Optimization Tool (PolOpT), which has already been applied in Uganda and several other African countries to help governments reallocate existing budgets more effectively.

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