The New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) Agency has, through one of its flagship programmes – the Compre-hensive Afric Agriculture Deve-lopment Programme (CAADP) – been intensifying talks on growing agricultural capacity and thereby eradicating hunger and poverty in Africa.

Nepad, in collaboration with the government of Botswana, the Southern African Development Community and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, hosted the Southern Africa Regional CAADP Nutrition Capacity Development Workshop, in September, in Gaborone, Botswana, under the theme Building Capacity to Mainstream Nutrition in National Agriculture and Food Security Investment Plans in Africa.

The workshop follows due consideration by Nepad that many African countries are not on track to meet the target of Millennium Development Goal One (MDG1), which is to eradicate extreme pov- erty and hunger by the 2015 deadline, says Nepad in a statement.

The workshop focused on countries where little or no progress has been made in achieving poverty targets that involve nutrition interventions, with Nepad intending to provide evidence-based solutions to the problem.

Nepad Agency CEO Ibrahim Assane Mayaki says that, through the CAADP Framework for African Food Security, the workshop has resolved to achieve MDG1 through agriculture-led growth, aimed at reducing risk at all levels by increasing the supply of affordable, nutritious and safe food, and impro- ving incomes of the poor while ensuring overall dietary diversity.

“The major constraints to the promotion of nutrition-sensitive agriculture and food-based approaches, identified at the workshop, include weak political commitment, a lack of understanding of the role that agriculture plays in nutrition and too few food sec-urity programmes on the continent.

“To this end, countries were urged to develop action plans in order to strengthen coordination among appropriate sectors and stakeholders to align ongoing and new nut- rition programmes with current or planned agriculture programmes,’’ elaborates Mayaki.

Participants from 14 countries attended the workshop. These included delegates from Ministries of Agriculture, Health, Education and Finance as well as civil society organisations and the private sector, with the common goal being to address the challenges of malnutrition and explore how best to coordinate efforts to effect- ively deliver nutrition services where they are most needed.

Mayaki further adds that the overall goal of the nutrition workshop was to ensure that nutrition interventions are planned, budgeted for and implemented as part of the National Agriculture and Food Security Investment Plans.

It is also part of a wider cap- acity development process designed to assist countries in enhancing the nutritional impact of national agriculture and food security investment plans, he explains.

The workshop was the third of its kind, which followed the first, hosted in Dakar, Senegal, for the West Africa region, in November 2011, and the second, hosted in Dar-es-Salam, Tanzania, for the East and Central Africa region in 2009.