Flagship Project Enhancing Resilience in Food Systems

Projects continued across Africa to improve the resilience of the city region food systems. Here are some highlights from 2022.

by SAE/WFSC

The Flagship Project Enhancing Resilience in Food Systems seeks to directly contribute to food systems resilience by supporting decision-making in practice through stakeholder participation in case studies and academic education. The project was initiated in 2013 and is led by World Food System Center member Johan Six. Support for the multiple subprojects comes from a wide range of food system actors, such as the Swiss Federal Office for Agriculture (FOAG), the UN FAO, multi-national companies and organizations, and academic partners. Here are some updates from 2022.

Looking ahead to a new phase

RUNRES

The RUNRES (Rural-Urban Nexus: Establishing a nutrient loop to improve city-region food system Resilience) team met for a workshop in Naivasha, Kenya in December to finalize the framework for Phase II of project (2023-2027 with a budget of 4.4 million CHF). The Swiss Development Cooperation subsequently approved the framework. After final approval, the team will continue helping to build locally important value chains in Ethiopia, Rwanda, South Africa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo for another four years.

Including voices in research

workers
Mélanie Surchat with workers in Rwanda (Image: WFSC).

In Rwanda, the on-going research of doctoral student Mélanie Surchat led to a Photovoice Exhibition at the Swiss Development Cooperation in Bern. She recently traveled back to Africa to further apply the photovoice method. In this photovoice project, 17 workers involved at RUNRES innovation sites were given a camera to take pictures of their positive and negative experiences as workers employed in waste recycling. Mélanie printed these pictures and used them to carry-out interviews on the basis of what the workers had portrayed.

By doing so, the topics of discussion were driven by the workers, rather than the lead researcher. Mélanie then reviewed the pictures to organize a participatory data analysis. For the analysis, the involved workers sat together to share and discuss the pictures they had taken. After a first round of sharing, they were asked to identify common themes and to classify their pictures by these themes. By doing so, the researcher was able to validate the findings with the workers themselves rather than for them. Striving to include workers voices throughout all phases of the research process from data collection to analysis and data sharing is important to steer away from tokenistic participation in research.

Publications about resilience

figure
Graphical abstract. (Sci.Tot.Environ.2022)

Several projects studied local value chains around the world. Results are now available in several publications.

Project: Operationalizing resilience in the face of climate change: The case of tomato producers in Morocco and Ghana


Project: Assessing the role of organic value chains in enhancing food system resilience’ (OrRes)

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