This report aims to analyse how food systems influence diets and nutrition. It offers three significant additions to previous frameworks. First, it emphasizes the role of diets as a core link between food systems and their health and nutrition outcomes. Second, it highlights the central role of the food environment in facilitating healthy and sustainable consumer food choices. Third, it takes into account the impacts of agriculture and food systems on sustainability in its three dimensions (economic, social and environmental).

The Purchase from Africans for Africa (PAA Africa) programme executed a pilot initiative for local food purchases, funded by the Brazilian government and the UK Department for International Development (DFID) in collaboration with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP). Implemented in five African countries (Ethiopia, Malawi, Mozambique, Niger and Senegal), the programme fostered a multisectoral approach.

This document aims to capitalise on the results of the pilot experience and qualitatively evaluate its contributions to the consolidation of an institutional market strategy for family farming in Mozambique.

Policy Brief 1

Institutional procurement programmes are based on the premise that governments, using their authority and financial capacity to award public tenders, can go beyond the immediate scope of simply responding to the state’s procurement needs by simultaneously also addressing its social, environmental and economic concerns.

Food and nutrition education goes far beyond the dissemination of information. It comprises a combination of evidence-based and behaviourally-focused educational strategies, which involve the active participation of all relevant actors and are reinforced by an enabling environment. The aim is to build healthy food-related practices and outlooks, as well as understanding, in communities, groups and individuals.