Spatial estimation of flood residual water cultivation (FRWC) potential for food security in Sédhiou and Tambacounda regions of Sénégal

Nearly 90% of farming households in Senegal rely on rainfed agriculture; in recent years, climate change-induced disruptions to rainfall patterns and the ensuing depletion of water resources have had adverse effects on agricultural production, livelihoods, and food security. Recent studies recommend further assessment of the viability of and potential for Flood Residual Water Cultivation (FRWC) as an alternative growing strategy (i.e., to supplement or extend natural growing seasons). This study utilizes satellite imagery, GIS mapping, and crop analysis to identify areas with high potential for FRWC in Senegal's Sédhiou and Tambacounda regions, and recommends key crops that can be grown using FRWC and support food security. By calculating the Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) values based on historical data for the rainy season (September) and the first dry month after the rainy season (November) over a 9-year period, areas with flooding potential were identified and mapped. To assess the crop-growing potential for these mapped areas, we used crop reference evapotranspiration (ET) and determined daily water requirements for the select crops included in our analyses. indicated suitable FRWC areas along river valleys in both regions, with specific locations identified along the Gambia River, the Senegal River in the Bakel Department, and low-lying plains near Kidira and Gourel Bouri. It was observed that regions closer to the Sahara Desert required more water for crop production due to higher temperatures and evapotranspiration rates. Our study identified a total potential FRWC area of 20.7 km² and recommends short-duration crops like okra, French beans, and drought-tolerant crops such as sorghum for FRWC. The integration of FRWC with climate-smart management practices can aid in climate adaptation and economic empowerment in the studied regions, and in Sub-Saharan Africa at large

Honduras food system profile: Better understanding food systems at country level

Country profiles are more than a simple compilation of national indicators. They are constructed and designed around a common framework and methodology to identify hotspots of unsustainability in the food systems and prioritize interventions at multiple scales to address these through targeted actions and investments. An important feature of the country profiles is that they are co-produced with key public and private food system stakeholders engaged in both identifying the data and validating results and emerging key messages. The use of a common framework also offers an opportunity for a global comparative analysis on food system transitions and transformations – not just at national but also international level – thus generating insights and lessons for decision-makers. We expect these profiles to contribute to relevant international processes, following the UN Food Systems Summit in 2021. This Honduras food system profile (also available in Spanish) is composed of three main blocks of information: (a) system drivers; (b) system components; and (c) system outcomes

Ethiopia Food System Profile

This Ethiopia food system profile is composed of three main blocks of information: (a) system drivers; (b) system components; and (c) system outcomes. The first main block recognizes how environmental, demographic, technological, political, economic, social, and cultural drivers influence the food system—from production to consumption. The second block considers three components of the system: its actors and activities, the food environment, and consumer behavior. The third block, which is the last, corresponds to the system's outcomes in terms of the nutritional and health status of the population, food security, and the country's environmental and socioeconomic conditions. This profile also presents a comparison of Ethiopia's data against three groups: the country's geographic neighbors (Eritrea, Kenya, Sudan, Somalia, and South Sudan), countries with similar GDP per capita (Burkina Faso, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Uganda, and Zambia), and the world average

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) disrupt food systems to deliver healthy diets to urban consumers: Twiga case study, Nairobi, Kenya

Micro Small and Medium-Enterprises (MSMEs) in many developing countries play an important role in the agri-food systems. They provide employment opportunities as well as source of foods for urban consumers. In Kenya, the MSMEs provide an interesting disruption in the rapidly growing traditional markets. Efficient sourcing of foodstuffs is one of the challenges faced by MSME food vendors in Nairobi. Traditionally small-scale food vendors travel by informal buses to wholesale wet markets several times a week to source limited volumes of fresh fruit and vegetables. These early morning trips generate additional costs including bus fare, relatively high unit costs for small volumes of purchases, insecurity, and opportunity costs for mostly female vendors. Twiga Foods, a Kenya agritech and logistics private company formed in 2014, seeks to resolve some of these issue through the efficient sorting and distribution of fresh produce in urban Kenya to reduce fragmentation in the produce market (Cook & O'Neill, 2020). It employs a cashless mobile-based business-to-business (B2B) food supply (fruits and vegetables) platform that connects farmers to small and medium-sized vendors, outlets and kiosks, and the main aim is to address the problem of food flow from farmers to markets in urban areas across Kenya (Cook & O'Neill, 2020; von Bismarck-Osten, 2021). What can the Twiga Foods case teach us about the potential of a disintermediation model in the LMIC food system to provide multiple benefits in terms of food and nutrition security, incomes, employment, and potential spill-over effects

Food and Nutrition Security in Urban Slums: Consumer Survey data for Kenya and Uganda

This paper presents data collected in July 2016 to assess the consumption patterns and dietary quality among vulnerable urban consumers at the Base of Pyramid (BoP). The data was collected within the project ‘Making Value Chains Work for Food and Nutrition Security of Vulnerable Populations in East Africa’ which was funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). The project was led by the Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT and implemented in partnership with KALRO, NARO, Goettingen University and UHOH. The project was under the CGIAR flagship program “Food Systems for Healthier Diets” under the Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH). A cross-sectional survey was conducted to collect data with the goal of assessing critical and sensible ways in which market systems work to improve the consumption of more diverse, safe and nutrient-dense foods. The questionnaire had five sections. Section A captured the geographical location of the households and interview day details. Section B captured household demographic details. Section C focused on household nutritious porridge consumption and preferences. In Section D, household access to nutrition information was captured while Section E details household assets and their nominal values. The anonymized data is arranged into six files; 01Identifier16 file contains all the data from section A. Similarly, household demographic information is in file 02Demography16. 03Consumption16, 04Flourattributes16, 05Assets16 and 06Text16 contain household nutritious porridge consumption and sources of the flour, important porridge flour quality attributes, household assets and their values, and crosscutting general household level data respectively

Food System Country Profiles

Food systems are complex, multi-dimensional and multi-sectoral. Better understanding their dynamics and assessing their performances is critical if we want to strengthen their contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals. A flurry of initiatives has emerged in the last few years, that propose multi-indicator “compendiums” intended to describe more holistically national food systems. Many of those compendiums, however, are made of 100 or more indicators. As such, they are often overwhelming the policy-makers who they were initially intended to guide, thus defeating their own purpose. There is a need to find a “middle ground” whereby the complexity, dynamic, and multi-sectoral nature of those food systems is still captured, but boiled down to a more manageable combination of key indicators that help prioritizing entry points for interventions. The process of identifying those key indicators also needs to follow a clear, transparent and reproducible protocol/methodology so that comparison between countries (and over time) remains possible, yet accounts for the specificity of each country’s food systems and its large socio-cultural and political context. Finally, the process needs to remain participative, involving the main stakeholders of the country’s food system and not just experts. The objective of the Food System Country Profile project is to demonstrate the feasibility of such an approach, initially by developing and field-testing a protocol in three pilot countries: Bangladesh in Asia, Ethiopia in Africa and Honduras in Latin America, with the ambition to expand the approach to other low and middle-income countries in the near future. The final product, which is in the form of Food System Country Profiles, offers a tool to facilitate more informed and evidence-supported decisions by key stakeholders around food systems