Associated projects
ARUA Centre of Excellence in Sustainable Food Systems
The ARUA Centre of Excellence in Sustainable Food Systems (ARUA-SFS) brings together ARUA members from East, West, and Southern Africa. ARUA-SFS also includes two historically disadvantaged South African universities as associate members (i.e., the Universities of the Western Cape and Fort Hare) and a broader consortium of African and international partners working on food systems research, policy, and capacity development. The aim is to increase each participating institution's networks exponentially and maximise the translation of knowledge into impact at grassroots and policy levels.
The FSNet-Africa project is one of the flagship projects of the ARUA-SFS. Another flagship project of this Centre is the ARUA-UKRI GCRF Partnership Programme for Capacity Building Food Security for Africa (CaBFoodS-Africa). CaBFoodS-Africa collaboratively builds the capacities required across research and policy to tackle the triple burden of malnutrition and help avoid the policy paralysis that, in some countries, has led to little or no progress towards addressing the SDGs.
The ARUA-SFS project partners, which include the University of Pretoria (host institution), Universities of Nairobi and Ghana (collaborating partner institutions), as well as FANRPAN and RUFORUM, incorporate expertise in agriculture, post-harvest losses, land use, food security, nutrition and health, rural livelihoods, and policy and institutional analysis.
The GCRF-Agricultural and Food Systems Resilience: Increasing Capacity and Advising Policy (AFRICAP) programme focuses on making agriculture and food production in sub-Saharan Africa more productive, sustainable, and resilient to climate change. The project aims to support climate-smart, sustainable agricultural development, helping countries reduce poverty and hunger while addressing the broader aims of the SDGs and key targets of the Malabo Declaration on Accelerated Agricultural Growth and Transformation for Shared Prosperity and Improved Livelihoods in Africa. It does so by engaging with key policy- and decision-makers in four focal countries: Malawi, South Africa, Tanzania and Zambia, providing evidence that will enable them to make decisions today that can contribute to a climate-resilient food-secure future.
