a project about urban food futures, conducting research in Cape Town, Nairobi, Ouagadougou
TMG’s work as part of the Urban Food Futures programme addressed the two questions:
1)How can urban and peri-urban food systems be transformed and made more equitable and accessible both for food system actors and in terms of food security and nutrition outcomes?
2) How can citizens be engaged and empowered to drive inclusive, transparent, participatory processes for urban transformations, ensuring synergies and complementarity with city councils?
Setting out at the height of the Covid-19 crisis, our work was driven by one overarching question: how have low-income communities in the three cities responded to the impact of the pandemic on food security? And, subsequently, what can we learn from immediate community responses to design pathways for transformation of urban food systems? To achieve food system transformation, therefore, we need to re-politicize issues around food and hunger. While celebrating individual successes, the impact we want to see goes beyond the single project. One of our main objectives for the second phase of the programme is to establish “Urban Nutrition Hubs” as spaces for learning, dialogue, and piloting of innovation. Using a living lab approach, the Hubs will serve as spaces for co-creating knowledge with local communities and other actors, and driving the implementation of our programmatic pathways as we continue to pilot and link multiple local innovations with municipal action. To achieve food and nutrition security in urban areas, food and nutrition policies must be fundamentally rethought from the point of view of the needs of those who are experiencing food and nutrition insecurity. Food security policies tend to neglect cities as a distinct entity requiring distinct policies, and they tend to focus on increasing food production. This negates the recommendations arising from a range of findings that show that food insecurity is often tied to income, gender, and social status. Strategies to address food and nutrition insecurity in informal settlements and low-income areas require solutions beyond traditional strategies that are often focussed on production-oriented solutions. If those had worked in the past, lives in informal settlements would look different today. Transformative changes to improve urban food security and nutrition must employ different strategies informed by local realities and must centre the consumer perspective. This requires a commitment to understanding the complex realities of urban low-income areas and informal settlements and acknowledge the drivers of food insecurity, particularly in the light of crises. Urban Nutrition Hubs are living labs in real-life settings where solutions to food system challenges emerge. Urban Nutrition Hubs are characterised by their multifunctionality. Food is symbolic of identity and collective culture and is often manifested in unpaid care work provided by women on farms, in kitchens, as vendors, or in other communal roles. Urban Nutrition Hubs will serve as places to advocate for women’s rights and support the empowerment of women through networking and advocacy programmes.
TMG's Pathways for Transformation:
https://downloads.ctfassets.net/rrirl83ijfda/6mSvmaV4SgT1Kedf6dS0jM/a24…
Proposed box for p.93/94 on agency and power
Case study – Scientific attempt to measure agency – and increase community agency by unpacking power
In Cape Town, a group of community researcher accompanied by students from Humboldt-University in Berlin tried to measure agency (Paganini et al., 2021). This process, and the triangulation of food security findings, empowered the community and increased their agency to play a role in communal food dialogues processes. In triangulating, discussing, and contextualising their research results, the co-researcher team realised the importance of active participation in food governance processes through these dialogues.
Agency was measured by identifying five domains for inclusion in our assessment of agency, in line with HLPE: diet sovereignty, food production, food processing, food distribution, and voice in food policies and governance. For each domain, we developed a set of questions corresponding to the type of empowerment an individual can have within a domain. We asked the participants about their perception before COVID-19 and now. An increase in the calculated index would potentially translate into a higher status of empowerment or agency in the respective domain (ibid, p.47)
The adjusted Agency Module for the household survey consists of 16 questions and reflects on individual perceptions of own situations, but also on communal situations pre-COVID-19 and “in these days”. For all domains, we asked if the respondents considered themselves as having knowledge, having the opportunity to make choices (for example on what food one wants to eat or what products to grow), having the power to change at the household level, and having the power to make changes in the community (ibid, p.48).
The survey with more than 1800 households showed that there is a positive relation between having a perceived agency and living in a food secure households. Respondents who live in food secure or mildly food insecure households have significantly more agency than respondents in moderately and severely food insecure households. This proves that there is a relation between food security and having a sense of having agency in the food system. Therefore, the quantitative operationalisation of agency in the Agency Module has potential for future refinement. Furthermore, it indicates that the newly introduced dimension of food security agency is related to the FIES, which measures the dimension of food access of an individual or household. In conclusion, having agency in the food system increases access to food and vice versa (ibid, p.93) Socio-economic characteristics such as age, gender, and employment status only play a minor or no role on agency. Variables which strongly influence agency are education and the place in which the respondent lives. Having a formal job or working as an urban farmer, fisher, vendor, community kitchen owner, or spaza shop owner increases agency as well. (ibid, p.94)
From this study, community researchers developed visions, among them to destigmatise hunger, to collaborate in dialogues to increase awareness on the right to food and to rethink community kitchens as hubs for change. These food dialogues held the potential to build on the initial momentum and relationships that had been developed through the Agency study into more established ward level food dialogues (Buthelezi and Metelerkamp, 2022).
Best,
Nomonde Buthelezi & Nicole Paganini
Dr. Nicole Paganini
Dear Moderator & Editors
Thank you for the opportunity to engage on this important topic. We have attached our comments alongside the relevant subsection.