Tracking agricultural spending when government structures and accounting systems change: The case of Malawi

Abstract

Tracking agricultural expenditure in developing countries in Sub-Saharan Africa in a consistent and harmonised manner is important, not only in the context of the multilateral spending commitments made under the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme, but also in order to gain a better understanding of the impact and efficacy of spending. In this paper, a method for identifying and aggregating spending items from a variety of sources is developed to better understand how agricultural spending has evolved in Malawi. The results show that the central government receives around 90% of agriculture allocations, and this is largely spent on fertiliser subsidies, leaving only limited funding for core strategic functions such as research, extension and irrigation. More generally, lessons learned from the Malawi analysis could potentially be applied in other country contexts with similar experiences in terms of the evolution of accounting systems or government structures.