After a year of revamping this partnership, PARM invited all the members of its Advisory Committee (AC) to join the seventh AC meeting in IFAD HQ in Rome, Italy. From 13 to 14 May 2024, the AC members and PARM Secretariat discussed PARM Horizon 2’s mid-term performance and reflected on how to strengthen ongoing synergies and identify new collaboration areas to pave the way for the Platform’s upcoming Horizon 3.
A partnership to advance the ARM agenda
A total of 12 members of the Advisory Committee from AGHRYMET, AGRINATURA, Eastern African Grain Council (EAGC), West African Farmers and Producers Organizations Network (ROPPA), World Food Programme (WFP), Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), African Union Development Agency-NEPAD, African Risk Capacity Group (ARC) and International Food Policy Research Institute (IFRPI) responded positively to PARM’s invitation to this hybrid meeting.
Chaired by Providence Mavubi, Director of Industry and Agriculture at COMESA and Chairperson of the PARM’s Advisory Committee, the meeting debuted with a warm welcome by the PARM Secretariat before the AC members shared in turn the updates on the Agricultural Risk Management (ARM) related activities from their respective organisations. Numerous initiatives to advance the management of risk were mentioned among which: (i) AGHRYMET’s capacity building and training activities; (ii) ECOWAS, ROPPA and IFPRI’s production of research through their research centres, institutes and observatories; (iii) Agrinatura’s development of 3 key risk management tools; (iv) WFP’s efforts to provide protection in the form of climate risk insurance; (v) EACG’s work in facilitating efficient, structured, inclusive, and profitable grain trade; (vi) ARC’s support to countries to better plan and manage natural disasters; (vi) AUDA-NEPAD’s newly established disaster risk management unit; and (viii) COMESA’s initiative to improve the collaboration among its member states to strengthen their resilience.
Building on these updates, the PARM Secretariat presented its results and the recommendations of the Mid-Term Evaluation of PARM Horizon 2 carried out by an external company. PARM had the opportunity to share key lessons learned from the eight (8) Risk Assessment Studies (RAS) conducted from Horizon 1 which demonstrated that the most frequent risks are the most impactful ones, thus creating a need to design comprehensive strategies to mitigate the identified risks. PARM introduced the five (5) investment projects already designed for Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Niger and Senegal which benefitted from high political ownership at government level with their commitment at 20% of in-kind contributions to the project implementation. Moreover, PARM presented its capacity development activities, the launch of the pilot phase of the Institutionalisation project, gender mainstreaming in ARM, risk transfer programme and the FARM-D Community of Practice.
AC members complimented the PARM Secretariat for the work done and the impressive achievements. To advance the ARM agenda, ROPPA suggested to practically mainstream PARM Capacity Development (CD) modules and the work done on gender into ROPPA’s member states action plans. IFPRI proposed to the PARM Secretariat to work with the Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture (RUFORUM) for its CD activities and to carry out an analysis on the necessity and cost effectiveness of insurance as ARM tool. ECOWAS offered to PARM to work in close collaboration with their field centers to scale ARM capacity training to farmers and farmers organisations (FOs). EAGC reflected on what extent the knowledge achieved and lessons learned along PARM process could inform IFAD and AC organisations programming.
The way forward
Building on the P(ARM) updates and discussions, all the AC members reflected on PARM – Advisory Committee partnership and identified areas of synergies and collaboration at country, regional and global levels to strengthen their partnership, as well as the value proposition for PARM Horizon 3. Numerous contributions noted the need to improve the exchange and mutualisation of information among members not to miss any opportunity of leveraging existing initiatives and the need to scale up the work done in other regions of the African continent and even beyond Africa.
PARM needs to play a key role at global level in strengthening the involvement of the private sector, continuing to focus and invest in the risk analysis in order to support governments in developing policies to boost investments in agriculture, as well as considering investing on risk impacts on food security, among others. The discussion provided PARM with many entry points to pave the way for the development of its new phase (PARM Horizon 3).
As the 7th AC meeting concluded, Ms. Providence Mavubi was re-elected as the AC Chairperson for a second term.
