The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and AKADEMIYA2063 recently organized a symposium focused on the theme of "Building Resilience in the Agrifood System: Innovative Approaches." This event took place on 19 September 2023 in Durban, South Africa, during the 7th Conference of the African Association of Agricultural Economists (AAAE) and the 60th Annual Conference of the Agricultural Economists Association of South Africa (AEASA).

The symposium featured two-panel discussions and one contributed paper, with a central emphasis on introducing the FAO’s Resilience Index Measurement Analysis (RIMA) to the sixty participants. RIMA was presented as a comprehensive tool for evaluating and tracking resilience at both household and food system levels. Additionally, AKADEMIYA2063 utilized this platform to introduce the AGRODEP-RIMA network, a joint initiative with FAO, aimed at fostering collaboration among researchers, policymakers and development practitioners in the pursuit of resilience-building efforts across Africa.

Aligned with FAO and AKADEMIYA2063's support to the African Union Commission (AUC) in resilience building, the AGRODEP-RIMA network seeks to enhance the capacities of country experts responsible for reporting on the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) Biennial Review. This initiative encourages greater engagement in the reporting process for the resilience tracking indicator and promotes increased empirical research on resilience in Africa.

Furthermore, the symposium served as a platform for discussing strategies to build resilient agrifood systems on a global scale, ensuring households' resilience to various shocks. Participants engaged in brainstorming sessions, shared their experiences and delivered presentations that highlighted the growing threats faced by agrifood systems in Africa, such as climate change, deforestation, natural resource depletion, extreme weather events, conflicts, pandemics and socioeconomic crises. Strengthening the resilience of agrifood systems involves enhancing the capacities of both systems and their stakeholders to prevent, anticipate, absorb, adapt and transform, when faced with shocks and stresses. It was emphasized that measuring and monitoring resilience effectively is fundamental to the sustainability of these systems, as it equips them to manage the risks arising from multiple uncertainties.

The symposium also underscored the practicality of the RIMA tool for resilience measurement through a presentation on the progress of FAO RIMA support to the CAADP Biennial Review System. Since 2017, the FAO RIMA team has played a pivotal role in facilitating the assessment of resilience-building efforts undertaken by African nations. By employing the RIMA tool with nationally representative household data, FAO has assisted the African Union Commission in the biennial review system of the CAADP. This collaborative effort has seen an increase in awareness of RIMA, with 32 countries reporting on the indicator tracking resilience-building efforts, up from 11 in 2019 and 15 in 2021.

In response to the attendees' enthusiasm and desire to learn more about RIMA, 54 participants expressed interest in receiving online RIMA training. In response to this demand, the FAO RIMA team has scheduled practical online training sessions starting in the second half of October. Additionally, the symposium participants decided to name the group benefiting from this training the "Durban Resilience Friends." They also suggested that FAO further its studies on threshold identification for the resilience capacity index to enhance its suitability for targeting and policymaking. Lastly, participants encouraged FAO to consider developing a standardized index for cross-country comparisons.