To advance member state performance and participation in the 2nd Biennial Review process, the African Union (AU) Department of Rural Economy and Agriculture (AUC DREA) in partnership with Partnership for Aflatoxin Control in Africa (PACA) and the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation ACP-EU (CTA) hosted a continental reporting training and workshop in Accra, Ghana from the 18th-22nd March 2019. Robert Ouma, Africa Lead’s CAADP Advisor facilitated the five day event of nearly 200 participants from nearly 50 countries. Participants comprised those who will implement the BR in their respective countries.
The purpose of the workshop was to train member state representatives on new CAADP Biennial Review (BR) technical guidelines, orient participants on the new online data entry tool for the “e-BR”, and to agree on the Coordination Mechanism and Continental Roadmap for submitting the second Biennial Report to the AU Assembly in January 2020. The training covered various technical details of the BR indicators, data entry processes, review of in-country roadmaps towards the final BR report, and country-REC consultations on validation processes.
The training was carried out by a network of experts drawn from technical agencies and universities across Africa (these expert trainers themselves had been taken through a Training of Trainers process designed and facilitated by Africa Lead working with the AU). The second Biennial Review has drawn significantly from lessons learned during the inaugural process: several new indicators have been introduced, including those addressing food safety. Furthermore, many indicators have been refined and sharpened to improve on accuracy. The AU is encouraging partners to support countries with data collection and analysis. It is envisioned that in-country processes will include rigorous, multi-stakeholder validation and dialogue centered on the data trends. Regional Economic Communities will play an important coordinating role, receiving data and providing improvement feedback. Finally, the AU will produce and present it to the AU heads of State.
The forum also provided an opportunity for Africa Lead to present to and train participants on the CAADP Peer-2-Peer Network, which is part of Africa Lead’s online collaboration platform, hosted in partnership with AUC DREA. The presentation and training, in both English and French, for the CAADP P2P network included a presentation of the features available to users on the platform, peer-to-peer user training on features, and support in signing on to and using the platform for existing users. Africa Lead and AUC DREA staff followed up with participants and triggered an overall onboarding of close to 40 new users who signed in on the network and started communicating on the online platform.