and the Egypt agriculture Public Expenditure Review. These countries were thus able to use the Bank support more strategically to develop their agricultural sectors. In contrast, commitment to agriculture is relatively recent in many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Post-independence governments in Sub-Saharan Africa tended to treat the agricultural sector primarily as a source of resources for industrialization. Their actions were in line with the prevailing development paradigm at the time, which viewed industrialization as the road to development, while agriculture was viewed as providing surplus to meet the needs of cities, with imports and food aid filling in when there were shortfalls or emergencies (Eicher 1999; IEG 2007j). Government spending on agriculture remained modest in Sub-Saharan Africa through the 1980s and 1990s, increasing only gradually, at 2.5 percent per year between 1980 and 2002. With the recent (2003) adoption of the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme, greater priority is being given to agriculture. The goals of the Regional program are to eliminate hunger and reduce poverty through agriculture, and governments in Sub-Saharan Africa have agreed to increase public investment in agriculture by a minimum of 10 percent of their national budgets and to raise agricultural productivity by at least 6 percent by 2015.5
The Bank has also invested less in building capacity in public institutions in the agriculture-based economies compared to its support in transforming economies (appendix table D.7). Though training activities supported by Bank projects and through the World Bank Institute can also contribute to capacity building, IEG’s recent evaluation of those training efforts (IEG 2008o) found that it is important to embed training in broader programs that address organizational and institutional capacity constraints so that individuals who are trained are able to apply their training in the workplace. That evaluation also found that lack of incentives posed a particular problem to civil service training in low-capacity countries. Project performance is worse in Sub-Saharan Africa and in agriculture-based economies more generally, in part due to the weaker capacity and inadequate long-term strategic focus. For example, an IEG assessment of three agricultural projects in Tanzania (IEG 2007i) rated the outcome moderately unsatisfactory or worse and the risk to development outcome high in two of them. The assessment
Photo courtesy of Masaru Goto/World Bank.
Commitment to agriculture in many SubSaharan Africa countries is relatively recent. Both public and private agricultural research capacity continues to be comparatively weaker in Sub-Saharan Africa (table 4.1; Pardy and others 2006), where agricultural education and training has been neglected (World Bank 2007f). Well-developed education and training systems are the foundation of country research capacity and help develop the technical experts needed to staff government departments and the private sector, as illustrated by the experience of Brazil, China, and India (Fan, Qian, and Zhang 2006; Lele and Goldsmith 1989; Stads and Beintema 2009) and as instructively illustrated by Bonnen (1998) in reviewing the U.S. experience for its relevance to developing countries.
Public and private research capacity continues to be comparatively weaker in Africa, resulting in worse project performance.
Institutional Factors
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