The Quality Of Agriculture And Food Security Policy Processes At The Federal And State Level In Nigeria: Results Of A Stakeholder Survey

Successful implementation of any government policy requires credible evidence in monitoring progress and in revising approaches as priorities shift with changing policy concerns. This means having sufficient national capacity to conduct policy analysis and research to fill key knowledge gaps. It also requires a demand for such research (by policy makers) to inform the national policy process and to improve the institutional architecture that supports the design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of the policies. The Feed the Future Nigeria Agriculture Policy Project is a project funded by the Nigeria mission of the United State Agency for International Development (USAID) to strengthen national capacity, promote and foster informed policy dialogue, and support Nigerian federal and state government efforts to improve their policy process. Underlying these objectives is the goal of the Nigeria Agricultural Policy Project to support efforts to improve the quality of agriculture and food security policy processes in terms of the institutional architecture within which these processes take place, the value of the discussions on the various policy, strategy, and program options being considered, and the degree to which objective evidence is used to guide decision making. This paper reports the results of a stakeholder survey undertaken in 2016 to serve as a baseline for the project to monitor progress in improving: 1) the quality of the agriculture and food security policy processes in Nigeria and, 2) the quality of the institutional architecture within which those processes proceed. One hundred and twenty-one stakeholders representing the government, NGOs, private sector, researchers, and donors completed a questionnaire that was designed to capture their opinions on a range of issues related to the current quality of agriculture and food security policy processes at federal and state level in Nigeria. The aggregate mean assessment score for the quality of policy process is estimated to be 1.37 at the federal level and 1.03 at the state level, and for the quality of institutional architecture is 1.4 at the federal level and 1.2 at the state level. On the scale of 0 to 3 used in this study, these scores represent stakeholder opinion on the policy process and institutional architecture to be close to ‘somewhat dissatisfied.’ The overall results indicate that while some elements of the policy processes and institutional architecture are in place, considerable improvements are still needed both at the federal, but especially at the state level to improve the overall quality of agricultural and food security policy processes and institutional architecture in Nigeria. There is need to ensure that Nigeria’s policy process at the federal and state level, is better informed by effectively utilizing available empirical evidence and enabling the availability and accessibility of reliable sector performance data. This will in turn enable a consistent assessment of the performance of the sector and appropriate allocation of resources for policy implementation. A similar survey will be conducted in 2018 and 2020 to serve as the mid-line and end-line assessments to monitor whether and how the quality of these policy processes are improving in Nigeria.