Repurposing Agricultural Budgets With Multiple Objectives and Fiscal Constraints: A Multicriteria Decision-Making Policy Tool Applied to Sub-Saharan African Countries

Abstract

Repurposing agricultural public resources toward higher-return incentives and investments can help transform agri-food systems. This is important for low-income countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, where limited budgets restrict options for boosting agricultural spending. We demonstrate how, within a tight budget envelope, opportunities exist to achieve better agricultural transformation outcomes. To this end, we developed the policy optimization modelling tool, PolOpT, which combines a multicriteria decision-making technique and a recursive-dynamic computable general equilibrium model. We applied it with datasets for six sub-Saharan African countries, including hundreds of estimated parameters that transmit the effect of policy measures onto agricultural productivity. The approach demonstrates that reallocating agricultural public expenditure across policy measures in these countries can potentially boost agri-food output by several percentage points, create almost a million off-farm jobs in rural areas, lift almost 3 million people out of poverty and allow 16 million people more to afford a healthy diet—all without extra funding.