Systems

COVID-19 shocked food systems across Sub-Saharan Africa. Movement restrictions, border closures, and interrupted supply chains affected actors from producers to consumers. In response, Canada’s International Development Research Center (IDRC) funded 18 research projects looking at the pandemic’s impact on food systems, the efficacy of mitigation measures, and on long-term responses to build resilience. 

Food Systems Foresight reviewed these projects to summarize trends in the pandemic’s impacts and food systems actors’ responses. We also  facilitated synthesis and sensemaking workshops to help IDRC staff operationalize our findings, which included a rapid landscape analysis of international responses as well as synthesized lessons for policy makers, funders, and researchers for future systemic shocks.

Our team created a “Learning Lab” to support GAIN’s EatSafe program. The program aims to improve food safety in informal markets through improved consumer demand for safe, nutritious food. Our digital Learning Lab made research accessible. It presented key findings through exciting audio and video summaries. These included: original podcasts, webinar remixes, and recorded presentations. We also hosted online discussions which sparked debate among the diverse participants of the Lab.

Businesses have natural incentives to reduce food waste in their operations, but often don’t know the extent of waste at each point in their supply chain.  

We interviewed >40 multinational food companies to understand food loss and waste measurement in their business. 

With a systems lens, we engaged the companies in designing a lean approach to food loss assessment and reduction. We learned that to be compelling, reductions need to link to metrics that support commercial and sustainability goals, so we focused our lean design work there. The research illuminated simple decision-support tools to make sense of the scale of food waste in business operations. 

Emerging markets require systemic approaches to economic development that focus on rural communities. 

We worked with the Chief Executive of a $200M international NGO to explore how market systems approaches can improve programmatic strategies. 

We convened the leaders of more than 70 country operations to raise system awareness and integrate market systems approaches into country-level programming.

COVID-19 revealed many deeply entrenched vulnerabilities within global and national food systems, stressing food markets and the small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that constitute those markets.

We conducted a rapid review of 140+ interventions that have been tested all over the world to support agri-food SMEs in weathering the pandemic and building back better. Analyzing these interventions across a range of systems-informed criteria we offered 8 priority actions for key food systems stakeholders to take, along with country deep dives that seek to apply this analysis to the national context of Kenya and Nigeria.