AVANTI Ag-Scan workshop takes place in Samoa

The second AVANTI Ag-Scan workshop was held in Apia, Samoa, in early February. The workshop brought together participants from the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Women, Community and Social Development, the Public Service Commission, the Samoa Bureau of Statistics, as well as the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP).

The workshop, facilitated by HELVETAS Swiss Intercooperation and Itad, gave participants the opportunity to self-assess their monitoring and evaluation capacity, and their ability to report against the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The objectives of the workshop were to:

• Bring together core stakeholders in the agriculture sector in Samoa to self-assess capacity under five LEAPS pillars: leadership, evaluation and monitoring, accountability, planning and budgeting, and statistics. 
• Create spaces for exchange and coordination on agricultural monitoring systems, including assessing synergies and feeding into Samoa’s upcoming mid-term review of its own 2016-2020 agricultural sector plan. 
• Strengthen the Results Based Management (RBM) approach and the coordination of ministerial entities under the five LEAPS pillars 
• Identify priority actions that guide the sector, under the leadership of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. 

Participants said of their Ag-Scan workshop experience:

"This Ag-Scan workshop is very useful in our line of work because we are able to align the plans that our Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries have according to what the government of Samoa has like the SDGs linking down to our sector plan also linking down to our corporate plan." - Keyonce Le Hang, Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries

"What I have learned is the ways we can identify some of the gaps and some of the areas that we need improvement for the project moving forward and how we can find ways to progress many activities that is under different project." - Sharon, Ministry of Labour

As a result of the workshop, participants developed an action plan to enhance their capacity for results-based management in the agricultural sector.

This second workshop is an important step towards the AVANTI initiative’s goal to strengthen national governments’ ability to report against the SDGs through improved monitoring, evaluation, reporting and learning capacities across 20 countries by 2021.