Project
Fair Food and Trade Systems for Africa Through Food Convergence Innovation (FCI4Africa)
The FCI4Africa initiative is dedicated to bolstering resilient, equitable, and nutritious food systems across Africa. The primary focus areas include:
• Promoting open and equitable trade practices.
• Harmonising non-tariff measures.
• Advancing digital transformation of food systems.
The PAP involvement is in developing an understanding of the structure of the current food system and what drives it, focusing on four elements – environment, social, economic and governance – and identify relevant leverage points in the system.
Introduction
A core aspect of the FCI4Africa project is the concept of Food Convergence Innovation (FCI) which is a transformative approach that integrates AI, consumer insights, and market strategies to enhance performance and wealth of the agri-food sector. FCI tackles complex challenges such as malnutrition, unemployment, and poverty, recognising their deep interconnections. This concept drives real impact through multidisciplinary collaboration, bringing together technology, social sciences and policy.
Description
The FCI4Africa project will employ the Food Convergence Innovation approach to tackle the concepts of fairness, justness, and climate-neutrality of African products in a holistic way. It not only considers what needs to be done from a technical perspective in terms of compliance with sanitary standards but also respects the human factor underlying the concepts of fairness and justness and what needs to be done to achieve these goals. The ongoing world network of food convergent innovation platforms (FCI) has been in development for more than a decade (Dube et al 2012; 2014; 2016; Hammond and Dube 2012; Jha et al 2014;
2020). FCI approach furthers not only the emerging knowledge,
conceptualizations and data initiatives underpinning small- and large-scale systems transitions towards sustainability, but also embeds these into a network of real-world modular ecosystem of project portfolio that range from behavioural change in individual to transformation of professional and organizational practice, to business and investment models, to system design, investment, and policy (single and nested jurisdiction from community, to city/town, to state/province, to national and global). The research questions addressed include (a) What are multiscale processes underlying ongoing individual and collaborative business, financing and governance models within real world projects in different entry points and relate to current disciplinary/sector and convergence scientific and practice evidence; (b) What has been the impact (single and convergent outcomes, i.e., agricultural, economic, environmental, and social/health) of past and ongoing initiatives (investment, policy and actions) towards reduction of GHG emissions, including key indicators (current and future) to accelerate climate solutions at scale; (c) What can be a real-time roadmap that supports real-world climate change solutions in an evidence-based, robust, agile, adaptive whole-society manner.