Dear friends,
Three countries appear in this edition, each at a different point of the same process.
Ethiopia is the furthest along. At the end of June, State Ministers from the Ministry of Agriculture sat down in Addis Ababa with representatives of ten Alliance member institutions and countries, and then, at a technical workshop, put each commitment to Yelemat Tirufat Plus against the others: what is covered, what is not, who does what next. The package announced in Doha — US$65 million from the African Development Bank, with technical support from Brazil, FAO, Germany, Spain, UNIDO, Village Enterprise, World Vision and the WMO — will now gain an implementation roadmap attached to it. The next phase aims to reach five million smallholder farmers across eight regions and 200 districts, as a new El Niño cycle raises concerns over rainfall and pasture.
Sitting in a room to work out whose money and whose expertise covers which gap makes no headlines. It is also the step that most often does not happen.
It is also why this edition’s Policy Basket highlights two Policy Instruments connected to Ethiopia’s soon-to-come Implementation Roadmap. Access to extension and rural advisory services and pro-poor access to agricultural inputs and climate-resilient technologies are what the partnerships behind Yelemat Tirufat Plus aim at implementing. That is the Basket doing the job it was built for: not just cataloguing good ideas, but framing how a government can take a policy priority it has chosen to a set of actions and implementations on ground.
Kenya shows the same movement in a different register. On 15 July, Brazil’s Ministry of Social Development began delivering the technical support it pledged for Maji Plus, Kenya’s water access programme for arid and semi-arid regions, alongside Kenya’s National Drought Management Authority and the WFP Centre of Excellence. Brazil’s Cisterns Programme has brought water to more than 1.3 million rural families and around 8,000 schools; Maji Plus is designed to improve water security for roughly 420,000 Kenyans and 1400 schools in the Arid and Semi-Arid Lands (ASALs). The participants were clear that the technology is the easy part — what has to travel with it is the governance, the community ownership and a delivery model that works across federal, state, municipal and community levels. A Kenyan field mission to Brazil follows, and a similar workshop with India, focusing on its Community Water Management Programme, is underway.
The third country flagged this month, Cambodia, is at the beginning. On 16 July, eleven government ministries met in Phnom Penh with the Support Mechanism and WFP to work through the country’s Policy on School Feeding 2024–2035 and identify where members could usefully come in. Eleven ministries, one plan, one full working day — anyone who has tried to assemble that inside a government will recognise it for the achievement it is. The tasks now are keeping the coordination active around a multi-agency school meals plan, identify gaps and structure a set of partnership requests that Global Alliance Members can respond to meaningfully.
The Board of Champions meets for the fourth time on 16 October in Rome, on the margins of the World Food Forum, to review progress and discuss how political commitment is renewed. A discussion paper from the SDG2 Advocacy Hub this month names the problem that meeting will have to sit with: the agenda is not short of frameworks — Kampala and CAADP 2026–2035, Nutrition for Growth, SUN 4.0 — it is short of focus. The piece calls on the UK, which assumes the G20 Presidency come December, to “build on the work started by the Brazil Presidency’s Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty that is a step towards reducing fragmentation”.
Between now and 2030, the question worth holding ourselves to is not how many members, frameworks or commitments we have assembled, but how many governments can point to something that actually arrived because of them.
All the best,
Renato D. Godinho
Director, Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty
Support Mechanism
