The Economic Impact Assessment of The World Food Program Expenditures

Area: East Africa

The World Food Programme’s (WFP) total portfolio in Regional Bureau Nairobi (RBN) countries is more than USD 2 billion annually. In 2019, the RBN region moved 1.1 million MT of food throughout the region. It disbursed USD 270 million in cash to 5.4 million beneficiaries in the countries covered by RBN. It procured and supplied more than 500,000 MT of food from local, regional, and global sources. These numbers increased further with the inclusion of Sudan in the RBN beginning in December 2020. This spending is vital to the humanitarian operations of the WFP. It also has economic impacts on RBN economies, potentially creating large income and production impacts in the region.

This project uses state-of-the-art economic modelling tools to estimate the broader economic impacts of WFP’s interventions in the region. Beyond food security and nutrition, they also include the impacts of WFP spending on food, logistics and other non-food expenditures in East Africa. These economic impacts include direct impacts as well as the indirect spill over effects that WFP operations generate.