60 members of farmer organizations and local institutions from Koungheul and Bambilor successfully completed a new training on school feeding programmes.

The activity started in November 2021 until January 2022, and it is specifically focused on inclusive and local public food procurement for school feeding.

The national Public Procurement Regulatory Authority - l’Autorité de Régulation des Marchés publics (ARMP) conducted this training in collaboration with FAO, within the project “Feeding Urbanization: Building prosperous cities and towns”.

Inclusive school food procurement from local smallholder farmers is recognized as a key instrument to maximize the benefits of school feeding programmes and as an entry point for local food systems transformation (FAO, 2019). Nevertheless, implementation is not always straightforward and public procurement procedures often represent an important bottleneck (FAO, 2019).

In Senegal, FAO has partnered with ARMP to support the overcoming of this bottleneck. The capacity building activity was preceded by a capacity needs assessment through which 104 representatives of farmer organizations and local public institutions were interviewed and shared their key challenges (and benefits) of the implementation of inclusive food procurement from smallholder farmers. The training, conducted on local languages, was also based on a simplified practical guide on local food procurement for schools (Guide pratique simplifie d’achats publics locaux pour les cantines scolaires), previous developed by ARMP with FAO support.

These three-days trainings represent one step within the broader support that the project “Feeding Urbanization: Building prosperous cities and towns” is providing to the local governments of Koungheul and Bambilor to foster urban food systems transformation.