في عام 2023، كانت انتشار انعدام الأمن الغذائي المعتدل والشديد في أفريقيا هو الأعلى في العالم ولا يزال في ازدياد (المنظمة الفاو، 2023). تشير التقديرات الأخيرة من قاعدة بيانات أسعار الغذاء من أجل التغذية إلى أن 25% من الأفارقة لا يستطيعون تحمل تكلفة السعرات الحرارية الكافية، والعديد أكثر (68%) لا يستطيعون تحمل تكلفة التغذية الكافية، ومعظمهم (84%) لا يستطيعون تحمل تكلفة نظام غذائي صحي. تؤدي الحالة إلى عواقب صحية خطيرة ومزيد من المشاكل الاجتماعية والاقتصادية، وتلقي بظلالها على إمكانية تحقيق هدف التنمية المستدامة القضاء على الجوع بحلول الموعد النهائي لعام 2030.

طموح محور أبحاث نظم الزراعة والغذاء والتغذية هو تقديم دليل جديد مفيد لتسريع انتقال أفريقيا إلى نظام غذائي اقتصادي واجتماعي وبيئي مستدام. نظرًا لأن وصول الأفراد إلى الأنظمة الغذائية الصحية ينتج جزئيًا عن الانفصال بين العرض المحلي للأغذية المغذية والآمنة والطلب عليها، تهدف IPORA إلى تطوير جدول أعمال بحثي شامل يأخذ في الاعتبار النظام الغذائي بأكمله، من الإنتاج حتى الاستهلاك.

 

This research axis is co-oordinated by  Kaleab BAYE (Nutrition, AAU), Tanguy BERNARD (Economics, UB), Zineb OMARY (Public Policies, UIR) and Thierry ZOUE (Food Sciences, UFHB)


Overall motivation

In 2023, the prevalence of moderate and severe food-insecurity in Africa was the highest in the world and yet still increasing (FAO, 2023). Recent estimates from the Food Price for Nutrition database suggest that 25% Africans cannot afford sufficient calories, many more (68%) cannot afford nutrient adequacy, and most (84%) cannot afford a healthy diet. The situation leads to serious health consequences and further social and economic issues, and casts a shadow over the possibility of achieving the “Zero Hunger” SDG by the 2030 deadline.

The ambition of the Agrifood systems and Nutrition research axis is to bring new evidence useful to accelerate Africa’s transition to an economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable food system. Recognizing that individuals’ access to healthy diets partly result from the disconnection between domestic supply of and demand for nutritious and safe food, IPORA aims to develop a comprehensive research agenda that takes into account the entire food system, from production to consumption. 


Integrated activities

The axis includes two complementary activities:

1. Building blocks for an Interdisciplinary and Policy Oriented Research portfolio: This activity assembles researchers from a diverse and highly complementary set of disciplines including: remote sensing, environmental sciences, plant sciences, economics, food science and nutrition, anthropology and political science. Its current research portfolio includes:

  • The Ethiopian Food Security Atlas (EFSA)[1] developed as part of an interdisciplinary (Economics and Nutrition) and inter-university (UB and AAU) PhD thesis.
  • The innovative mapping of national stakeholders engaged in Food and Nutrition policies, as part of an inter-disciplinary Post-Doctoral fellowship (Geography, Economics and Political Sciences).[2]
  • The piloting and improvement of new Food Value Chains analytical tools, as part of four interdisciplinary internships (Food Sciences and Economics) in Côte d’Ivoire and Ethiopia, conducted in partnership with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and supported by IPORA seed funding.[3]
  • The development of an interdisciplinary research community through regular scientific exchanges (online seminars and workshops, along with internal/external communication channels) facilitated by the WP6’s deputy coordinator. The research theme currently involves over 25 researchers from a wide array of scientific disciplines.
  • The establishment of research partnerships with national and international stakeholders, among which the Ethiopian and the Ivorian National Information Platforms for Nutrition, CGIAR centers in Côte d’Ivoire (AfricaRice), Morroco (ICARDA), and Ethiopia (ILRI, CIMMYT, IFPRI), NGOs (Digital Green, Rikolto) and Private sector (Lersha, OCP Foundation)

2. A multi-year and multi-country, interdisciplinary research portfolio : Over the past two years, IPORA WP6 has developed 7 research protocols, including 4 that that were submitted to international competitive calls for external funding. While each proposal focuses on a specific topic within the theme of Agrifood Systems and Nutrition, each one also features important complementarities further strengthening one another.[4]  Research in this axis take place in Morocco, Côte d’Ivoire and Ethiopia.  External funding was sought from the following sources: (i) the Standing Panel on Impact Assessment of the CGIAR (€ 1.75  million, accepted for 3 years and renewable. It includes 1.25 million for a large-scale research program in Ethiopia, and 250,000 for preliminary work in Côte d’Ivoire and Morocco), (ii) the UM6P-J-PAL Agricultural Lab for Africa (€ 375,000, under review), (iii) the Fund for Innovation in Development (€ 1.5 million, under review).   Another application was submitted to an EU/Horizon Europe call in 2024 (requested: € 4.6 million). Although rejected, the rating and comments from reviewers encouraged a resubmission after improvement.


Academic validation

Within two years, IPORA has built a strong interdisciplinary research team related to agrifood systems and nutrition in Africa. Enabled by IPORA’s support to innovative analytical tools – soon to be submitted to a leading academic journal – and human resources (junior researchers and administrative support), researchers from different disciplines and  no previous collaborations have jointly developed a new and ambitious research agenda, already validated by some success in competitive internal calls for proposals, and further encouraged by two national academic recognitions in France and in Ethiopia: a five years 2/3 teaching sabbatical for this research agenda by the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF) for Tanguy Bernard; and a full university professorship at Addis Ababa University attributed to Kaleab Baye.

[1] The EFSA, which combines large amounts of existing data provides researchers and policy-makers with time-stamped geospatial data and related maps that can uniquely inform research-policy dialogues and identify policy-relevant areas in need of investigation. All developments of the Atlas are open-source to facilitate replication and improvements by its users. Piloted in Ethiopia in association with Ethiopian Statistical Service, the approach is now being replicated in Côte d’Ivoire together with the Ivorian National Institute of Statistics.

[2] Developed in Côte d’Ivoire with replications planned in Morocco and Ethiopia, the Stakeholder mapping builds on social network analyses applied to policy network and advocacy coalition frameworks, to measure stakeholders’ relationships, identify coalitions of actors, and assess their role in past and current orientation of local food and nutrition policies. This work draws from and seeks to improve upon similar approach developed by IPORA researchers in the context of social protection policies (Berrou et al. 2021).

[3] The internships were designed to test and improve on the approach proposed by IPORA researchers who develop an analytical model to identify key Agrifood Value Chains parameters whose values can feed a designated simulation tool informing public policies under time/budget/contextual constraints (Bernard and Giraud-Héraud, 2023).

[4] Complementarities are important with respect to data collection needs (e.g. large-scale household surveys), research equipment (e.g. unmanned aerial vehicles for remote sensing, or HPLC analyzers for crop sample analyses), staff (e.g. PhD students, Post-doctoral fellowships, Research assistants and Interns), as well as research and policy networks.