Ag-Scan Workshop in Apia, Samoa

5 – 7 February 2019

Watch the short version:

About the workshop

The second AVANTI Ag-Scan workshop was held in Apia, Samoa, in February 2019. The workshop brought together participants from the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Labour, the Public Service Commission, the Samoa Bureau of Statistics, as well as the Rome based UN agencies: International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP).

The workshop, which was facilitated by HELVETAS Swiss Intercooperation and Itad, gave participants from the agricultural sector the opportunity to self-assess their capacities for Results-Based Management, and their ability to report against the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The objectives of the workshop were to:

Bring together core stakeholders in the agriculture sector in Samoa to self-assess capacities under five LEAPS pillars: leadership, evaluation & monitoring, accountability, planning & budgeting, and statistics.
Strengthen the Results Based Management (RBM) approach and the coordination of ministerial entities under the five LEAPS pillars
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.
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 has to what the government of Samoa has, like the SDGs that link to our sector plan also linking 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 need improvement for the project moving forward and how we can find ways to progress many [of our] activities…”- Sharon Roma, Ministry of Labour

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

The Ag-Scan methodology was appreciated by the participants since it was thought to be simple, adaptable and focused on assessing the entire agricultural sector instead of individual projects.

This second workshop – after Peru – 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 16 countries by 2021.