Rethinking Africa’s target setting for agricultural public expenditure: Does quantity matter more than quality?

In 2014, African governments pledged to allocate 10% of public spending to agriculture in pursuance of 6% agricultural GDP growth. Most countries have not met these targets but, still, they reaffirmed their commitment to meet similarly ambitious targets in the 2025 Kampala Declaration. The CAADP Strategy and Action Plan 2026–2035, which broadens the focus from agriculture to agrifood systems, recognizes the importance of improving spending quality but lacks an evidence-based framework to enable it. We assess whether increasing spending on agriculture to reach 10% of total spending is enough to achieve agricultural growth targets in six sub-Saharan countries. We apply the policy optimization tool, PolOpT, which combines a multi-criteria decision-making technique with a recursive-dynamic computable general equilibrium model. We find that the level of spending to achieve 6% agricultural GDP growth depends on countries’ specificities, including economic structure, inter-sectoral linkages and fiscal capacity. Spending quality (i.e., optimizing spending allocation) can matter more than spending quantity in some countries. Evidence-based, country- specific allocations are essential to maximize the impact of public spending on agricultural productivity and broader societal objectives. Countries should optimize agri-food expenditure composition for increasing cost-effectiveness, setting targets more realistically, and meeting their agri-food GDP target by 2035