NOURICITY - Partnerships for Healthy Diets and Nutrition in Urban African Food Systems - Evidence and Strategies

Africa is urbanizing fast and over the next decades will likely witness a transition of its poverty and malnutrition hotspots from rural to urban communities. This project aims at investigating the structure and dynamics of urban food systems in Africa (including rural-urban food value chains and the role of small-scale, informal actors), and at analyzing the co-existence of different facets of urban malnutrition and their drivers. The project covers a transect of poor to moderately wealthy countries, settlements and neighborhoods. The outcome of the project will be a partnership concept for coherent and evidence-based urban nutrition policies. To that end, the project will rely on participatory research with stakeholders of the food systems in selected urban study sites in Ghana, South Africa and Uganda. Together with nutrition and public health practitioners and the identified actors of the three local food systems, researchers will devise and test policy scenarios to develop a blueprint for partnerships seeking improved urban nutrition in Africa.

• Micro-household surveys
• Econometric modeling
• Participatory system and policy mapping
• Value-chain analysis