Promises made by African leaders to increase their investment in agriculture to ten per cent of their national budgets have been met by only eight out of 53 countries, the 7th Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) Partnership Platform Meeting heard last week (23–25 March).
But annual international donations to agricultural research capacity in Africa have soared from US$25 million annually to US$120 million in the period 2005–2010.
It isn’t clear how the numbers SciDev.net reports have been calculated, and it doesn’t much matter. If better research really is the engine of economic growth that some people say it is, then one would expect countries that need it most to do their bit. What would happen, I wonder, if international donations were based on some sort of matching scheme?