Imagine redesigning a city so that healthy, fresh food is as easy to find as fast food. This work helps cities change their layout and rules to support local farmers and small food shops. It's like creating a blueprint for cities to feed their people better while protecting the planet.
African cities struggle with food insecurity and environmental degradation due to poor infrastructure and a lack of support for small-scale, sustainable agri-businesses.
The project is producing methodological guides, public awareness toolkits, and real-world socio-technical pilot projects in 20 cities.
If you are a startup dealing with low local value addition — this project developed acceleration tools that help women- and youth-led businesses grow and participate in the urban economy. This allows for better integration into the food supply chains of 20 implementation cities.
If you are a developer dealing with inefficient food distribution — this project developed socio-technical experiments in 5 hub cities that optimize food environment infrastructure. This leads to more resilient urban food access and better land use.
If you are a small business dealing with lack of market agency — this project developed multi-actor governance models that empower informal vendors. This gives small businesses more ownership over how food is sold and accessed in their cities.
Based on available project data, specific pricing or implementation costs are not provided.
The project is scaling through a network of 65+ cities, including 5 hub cities, 10 African sharing cities, and 5 European sharing cities.
Based on available project data, the project focuses on methodological guides and public awareness toolkits rather than patents.
The project promotes inclusive governance to empower public officials to shape food systems and improve nutrition security.
The project period runs from 2022-12-01 to 2026-11-30.
The consortium is highly diverse with 29 partners across 12 countries. While the industry ratio is low at 3% (1 industry partner), there is a strong presence of SMEs (7 partners) and a heavy reliance on 'Other' organizations (17 partners), likely representing the local governments of the 20 implementation cities. This structure suggests the project is driven by policy and governance rather than pure commercial product development.
Contact ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability-Africa in South Africa
Contact us to explore how to adapt these urban food system toolkits for your city.
