Emerging food retailers and the development of hybrid food retail institutions in Ugandan produce supply chains

Changing institutional arrangements are central to the nascent transformation of food retail in Eastern and Southern Africa (ESA). These emergent arrangements are reshaping the power relations, roles, and livelihood outcomes for actors in the region\u27s food systems. This study examines processes of institutional change within fruit and vegetable supply chains that are stemming from the expanding geographical scope of global private food standards, and from policy and demographic shifts in Uganda. First, the study examines the mechanisms through which global private food standards influence procurement strategies of emerging food retail operators (supermarkets, hotels, fast food restaurants and cafés) and how suppliers are responding to these institutional changes. Second, the dynamics of long-term change within market-oriented producer organizations linked to emerging food retailers are analyzed. Dissertation fieldwork involved 12 months of qualitative research in Uganda. During the first phase, data on the influence of global private food standards on procurement strategies were collected through in-depth interviews with 14 large format food operators in Kampala and 25 produce suppliers to these retailers. Additional data were collected through participant observation in a supermarket and fast food restaurant for a period of one month. The second phase analyzed institutional change at the farmer level, based on a case study of the Nyabyumba Farmers Association, a small scale producers\u27 group in Kabale district that supplies an international emerging food retailer in Kampala. Seven focus groups and 40 household interviews were conducted with members of the association. Three mechanisms through which global private food standards are transferred to the local level are identified: 1) direct embedding of retailers within international quality assurance schemes; 2) articulation of standards mimicking private food standards but lacking the requisite administrative and technical enforcement mechanisms; and 3) identification with global food systems but complete reliance on local informal institutional arrangements. Suppliers have responded to emergent hybrid institutional arrangements either by increasing the scale of operation or by carving out supply niches for knowledge intensive crops. At the producer level, transformations in the market and local institutional environment increased the perceived cost in time and effort spent on those association activities geared towards supplying the emerging food retailer. In addition, different levels of technical knowledge and skills resulted in significant modifications in the motivation and consistency of participation in association activities and the decision making structure. The findings have implications for the likely impacts of retail transformation processes on the roles of global processes in the transformation of food systems in ESA, the responsibility of government and non-governmental actors in assuring market access for small scale producers and food security for urban populations as well as the conditions under which women are likely to benefit from market oriented collective action

Southeast Minnesota Food Access Profile

This archival publication may not reflect current scientific knowledge or recommendations. Current information available from the University of Minnesota Extension: https://www.extension.umn.edu.Minnesota Department of Health, Community Transformation Grant, Centers for Disease Control and Preventio

Ethnography in agricultural research: a tool for diagnosing problems and sustaining solutions

In order to meet the future challenges of African agriculture, scientists and policy makers will need to move away from prescriptive measures, to more adaptive ways of understanding and addressing problems based on local capabilities and resources. Ethnographic frameworks and methods are one adaptive tool that researchers can use in parsing out complex situations within the context of local practice and culture. This paper highlights the use of an ethnographic framework called the Livelihoods as Intimate Government (LIG) approach and its application in Ghana and Malawi. The authors demonstrate how without preconceived ideas about what challenges exist, the LIG approach is able to illuminate some of the most pressing needs that affect the livelihoods of rural smallholder farmers. Preconceived notions tend to lead to poor diagnosis of problems, which then results in misplaced solutions and misapplication of funds to implement recommended strategies. Use of LIG sets parameters that are specific to the local context, which promotes development of appropriate policies, and sustainability of food security programs, ensuring that limited funds are used appropriately.Keywords: Ethnography, field methods, Ghana, Malaw

How to Use the Regional Profiles on Healthy Food Access

This document provides a brief overview of the contents of the profiles and the available data used to create them. All data are from secondary or existing sources and thus there are limitations for their use. This document also lays out some DOs and DON’Ts for their use.This archival publication may not reflect current scientific knowledge or recommendations. Current information available from the University of Minnesota Extension: https://www.extension.umn.edu.Beginning in November 2012, the Regional Profiles on Healthy Food Access were created for six regions of the state. Data were compiled by University of Minnesota Extension educators as part of the statewide Community Transformation Initiative for Healthy Eating. The primary purpose of the Regional Profiles on Healthy Food Access was to understand the social determinants of health in order to identify populations with 1) significant health inequities, and 2) limited access to healthy food. This understanding would then enhance regional work on behalf of the Community Transformation Initiative for Healthy Eating.Minnesota Department of Health, Community Transformation Grant, Centers for Disease Control and Preventio

Sustainability in a changing world: integrating human health and wellbeing, urbanisation, and ecosystem services

There is an urgent need to address interlinked sustainability issues in a world challenged by inequality, finite resources and unprecedented changes across Earth’s systems. As Future Earth Fellows, based on our collective expertise in a diverse range of sustainability issues, here we identify a specific need to recognise and respond appropriately to the nexus between human health and wellbeing, urbanisation, and ecosystem services (the ‘WUE nexus’). This nexus is a priority area for research, policy and practice. In particular, it provides a useful pathway to meet the challenges of successful implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In this brief, we present the following policy recommendations:1. By emphasising urban-rural linkages, foster an integrated approach to ensure food security, food safety, and health promotion;2. Secure resilient livelihoods for all, in particular for vulnerable groups; and3. Integrate co-production of knowledge in science for decision-making, including the co-design of implementation frameworks, and the adoption of a nexus approach.<br/

Emerging food retailers and the development of hybrid food retail institutions in Ugandan produce supply chains

Changing institutional arrangements are central to the nascent transformation of food retail in Eastern and Southern Africa (ESA). These emergent arrangements are reshaping the power relations, roles, and livelihood outcomes for actors in the region's food systems. This study examines processes of institutional change within fruit and vegetable supply chains that are stemming from the expanding geographical scope of global private food standards, and from policy and demographic shifts in Uganda. First, the study examines the mechanisms through which global private food standards influence procurement strategies of emerging food retail operators (supermarkets, hotels, fast food restaurants and cafés) and how suppliers are responding to these institutional changes. Second, the dynamics of long-term change within market-oriented producer organizations linked to emerging food retailers are analyzed. Dissertation fieldwork involved 12 months of qualitative research in Uganda. During the first phase, data on the influence of global private food standards on procurement strategies were collected through in-depth interviews with 14 large format food operators in Kampala and 25 produce suppliers to these retailers. Additional data were collected through participant observation in a supermarket and fast food restaurant for a period of one month. The second phase analyzed institutional change at the farmer level, based on a case study of the Nyabyumba Farmers Association, a small scale producers' group in Kabale district that supplies an international emerging food retailer in Kampala. Seven focus groups and 40 household interviews were conducted with members of the association. Three mechanisms through which global private food standards are transferred to the local level are identified: 1) direct embedding of retailers within international quality assurance schemes; 2) articulation of standards mimicking private food standards but lacking the requisite administrative and technical enforcement mechanisms; and 3) identification with global food systems but complete reliance on local informal institutional arrangements. Suppliers have responded to emergent hybrid institutional arrangements either by increasing the scale of operation or by carving out supply niches for knowledge intensive crops. At the producer level, transformations in the market and local institutional environment increased the perceived cost in time and effort spent on those association activities geared towards supplying the emerging food retailer. In addition, different levels of technical knowledge and skills resulted in significant modifications in the motivation and consistency of participation in association activities and the decision making structure. The findings have implications for the likely impacts of retail transformation processes on the roles of global processes in the transformation of food systems in ESA, the responsibility of government and non-governmental actors in assuring market access for small scale producers and food security for urban populations as well as the conditions under which women are likely to benefit from market oriented collective action.</p

Really effective (for 15% of the men): Lessons in understanding and addressing user needs in climate services from Mali

The design of effective climate services requires the identification of a problem that might be addressed through the provision of weather and climate information, and the design and delivery of actionable information to a set of appropriate users. The utility of weather and climate information for a given user is shaped not only by exposure to particular weather, climate, and market shocks and stresses, but also the sensitivity of that user’s livelihoods to particular shocks and stresses and whether or not their adaptive capacity includes the ability to use such information. Therefore, effective climate services are very place-, time-, and vulnerability-specific, and required careful social scientific investigation into user needs as part of the design process. Such investigation is also critical to the monitoring and evaluation of such projects, for they may lose their efficacy when applied to challenges or user communities other than those for which they were designed. This article uses the example of Mali’s agrometeorological advisory program to illustrate these points. This program, designed during a severe drought in the late 1970s and early 1980s, sought to address acute food insecurity by boosting food availability through yield increases. This design achieved its goals by targeting the users (senior men who owned their own agricultural equipment) who were most able to make rapid changes to the production of staple grains. It is only in the contemporary context of resilience programming and an increasing concern for climate change adaptation that the relatively small, highly gendered set of users able to engage with this climate service became a lens through which to view this program as a failure. The contemporary challenge for the program, and indeed any climate service aimed at addressing vulnerabilities produced by a variable, changing climate, lies in how it might remain relevant as our understanding of the dynamics of food security have shifted away from a focus on food availability, the weather- and climate-related stresses most important to agrarian populations shift with the changing climate, and our concerns for resilience demand that this program reach a much wider set of users and serve a broader set of needs than initially imagined

Really effective (for 15% of the men): Lessons in understanding and addressing user needs in climate services from Mali

Climate services have long been held up as development tools with tremendous potential to reduce risk and vulnerability, and build resilience, for agrarian communities in the Global South (Dessai et al., 2009, Fröde et al., 2013, Pervin et al., 2013, USAID Global Climate Change Office, 2014). The ongoing development and refinement of climate service-based tools, such as weather based index insurance, provides opportunities to stabilize and protect people’s livelihoods by establishing new forms of safety nets, strengthening existing safety nets, and supporting the general improvement of risk management mechanisms (Carter et al., 2014, Hess and Syroka, 2005, Jensen et al., 2015, Mburu et al., 2015). For example, climate advisories and information offer opportunities to inform farmer management of climate related risk (Boyd et al., 2013, Carr et al., 2015c, Hansen, 2012, Hellmuth et al., 2011, Ingram et al., 2002), such as by supporting farmer decisions with regard to intensifying production, investing in new technologies, or taking measures to protect their households and livelihoods in the case of adverse predictions (Carr et al., 2015a, Carr et al., 2015c, Hansen, 2012)

Summary Report: Innovative Qualitative Approaches for CIS Monitoring and Evaluation

Climate information services (CIS) for agriculture and development are useful only when farmers have the ability to make changes in their activities and practices based on the information received. This ability is mediated by a wide range of factors and considerations, such as access to appropriate seeds or needed agricultural equipment, or the authority to make decisions about the cultivation of a particular farm plot. Different users of a CIS will have different abilities to act on weather and climate information, and therefore effective CIS design begins with the empirical identification of potential CIS users and their climate information needs as shaped by these mediating factors. At the same time, user expectations of CIS, environmental conditions, and the social and economic factors that shape the utilization of weather and climate information can change during the implementation of a project. To effectively monitor and evaluate CIS therefore requires approaches to monitoring and evaluation (M&E) that identify and analyze these complex factors. This report outlines lessons about CIS monitoring and evaluation drawn from two qualitative pilot assessments of CIS users and their needs in Senegal (Carr et al. 2018) and Rwanda (Onzere et al. 2018). These assessments were conducted by the Humanitarian Response and Development Lab (HURDL) as part of the Climate Information Services Research Initiative (CISRI) funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development. The goal of these assessments was to test innovative evaluation methodologies on ongoing programs to develop general lessons that could contribute toward improving the design and evaluation of CIS interventions. Specifically, HURDL tested the utility of the Livelihoods as Intimate Government (LIG) approach (described below) as a means of identifying different users and the factors that shape their different weather and climate information needs, for the Multidisciplinary Working Group (MWG) model in Senegal and the Climate Services for Agriculture Initiative (CSAI) in Rwanda. A growing literature demonstrates that understanding who the potential users of these CIS are, and their needs for weather and climate information, allows for the design of monitoring and evaluation efforts that are aimed at likely impacts. Further, because the potential impacts of climate information are never evenly distributed across a population, better understanding users and their information needs, calibrates monitoring and evaluation to what a significant impact looks like in a particular place or population

Who’s Governing Community Forests? Gendered Participation in Liberian Forest Management

Published on the website for the World Resources Institute, a global research organization. Across sub-Saharan Africa, women play an important role in managing the forests that support their lives, livelihoods and households. Yet they are often excluded from decision-making processes affecting these natural resources. As many African countries take steps to decentralize natural resource management and strengthen local forest governance mechanisms, it is critical to understand the barriers that women face when they try to engage in forest management. Doing so can help ensure that decisions made at both national and community levels protect women’s access to forest resources as well as benefit from their wisdom on sustainable management. This paper examines how power relations, authority and competing interests converge to shape both resource access as well as individual community members’ ability to participate in forest management. It identifies patterns of engagement in forest governance, explains these trends and highlights pathways through which women’s participation in managing these ecosystems may be improved. Field research, conducted in collaboration with Clark University and the Foundation for Community Initiatives (FCI) in Liberia, finds that women’s livelihoods and the sustainability of forest resources would greatly benefit from women’s participation in local decision-making processes. Women, for example, often possess unique knowledge and skills that can help improve forest management, because they tend to use different forest resources than men. However, significant regulatory and social changes are needed to achieve this goal. This paper finds that a deeper understanding of local power relations and social dynamics must underpin efforts to foster gender and social equity. Such an analysis can also help decision-makers avoid risks to already vulnerable people and the forest resources on which they depend