AfriFOODlinks envisions a thriving network of cities in Africa and beyond, in which food systems and nutrition are firmly established on the local governance agenda. Citizen-led multi-stakeholder governance platforms welcome diverse voices to inform policy and urban planning processes that promote food and nutrition security and environmentally regenerative practices.
AfriFOODlinks’ five methodological approaches:
- Knowledge validation and amplification: This involves placing a researcher in each city to undertake process-oriented engagements seeking out existing knowledge (not knowledge creation) and proactively legitimising this existing knowledge and the roles and voice of the knowledge actors, while integrating this knowledge into ongoing processes.
- Strengthening or developing multi stakeholder platforms (MSPs): Given the continent’s fragmented urban governance system, AfriFOODlinks will promote a coherent and participatory approach to urban governance.
- Incubating innovative circular businesses, and guiding the development of enabling business environments.
- Mutual learning, sharing and operationalisation of knowledge: the theoretical and practical outcomes of this project will be shared and enriched through a programme of mutual learning between multiple stakeholders across project cities. These will be convened around a virtual knowledge hub and will vary in depth to include informational webinars for network cities, inter-city dialogue and learning, city-to-city match-making, and intra-city fora for deep multi-stakeholder engagement. The 5 Hub and 15 Sharing Cities will be clustered into five groups. A programme of city exchange visits will be organised. The city exchange visit will result in codesigned pilot project proposal.
- Experimentation, piloting and demonstration: a mosaic of innovative real-world experiments across twenty cities will contribute to the research, evidence and action. Five large experiments in the Hub Cities and 10 small-scale pilots, co-designed as part of the mutual learning exchanges, will be implemented in the African Sharing Cities.