Optimizing public spending allocation to advance CAADP’s agricultural transformation agenda

Through the Malabo Declaration, African governments committed to allocating 10 % of public expenditure to agriculture to achieve 6 % annual agricultural GDP growth and halve poverty by 2025. These objectives remain largely unachieved. The Kampala Declaration adopted in 2025, nevertheless, maintains the 10 % expenditure target, broadens its scope from agriculture to agri-food systems, and sets ambitious goals for output growth and diet affordability by 2035, among others. We argue that optimizing agricultural public expenditure allocation across policies and subsectors is important for advancing this broader transformation agenda. Using PolOpT, a policy optimization tool combining multi-criteria decision-making with a recursive-dynamic computable general equilibrium model, we examine whether meeting the 10 % agricultural spending target can help deliver Malabo’s unmet agricultural growth objective in six sub-Saharan African countries, while accounting for an optimized allocation, alternative financing sources, and multiple socioeconomic objectives. We find that spending 10 % of countries’ budgets on agriculture will not necessarily generate 6 % agricultural GDP growth. Results reveal substantial cross-country variation in budgetary priorities: higher spending matters more where initial spending is low and composition is close to optimal, while improved allocation matters more in countries with higher spending and/or markedly sub-optimal allocations. Optimizing allocations across multiple objectives entails modest agricultural GDP trade-offs and produces substantial gains in employment, poverty reduction, and diet affordability, while reducing the financing burden of the 10 % target. Realizing these gains will require stronger governance and institutional capacity for effective reallocation, together with political commitment and cross-sectoral coordination to sustain reforms over time.