Systems

Food loss and waste (FLW) is more than discarded food. It reflects the inefficiencies of agrifood systems under pressure. FAO has identified FLW reduction as a critical entry point to achieving the 2030 Agenda, linking it to better nutrition, sustainability, and resilience. We partnered with FAO to review the last decade of its FLW initiatives, identifying where systems approaches have been applied and where new opportunities exist. Alongside this, we assessed the mandates and activities of peer organizations to understand complementarities and highlight opportunities for collaboration. Our guidance equips FAO to embed a food systems approach, navigate trade-offs, and strengthen partnerships in order to deliver systemic FLW reduction and accelerate agrifood systems transformation.

Food systems transformation is a complex concept with novel measurement challenges. We partnered with GAIN to identify indicator gaps relating to National Pathways identified in the lead up to the 2023 UN Food Systems Summit to enable future monitoring of progress towards food systems transformation.

We facilitated workshops across Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Tanzania, bringing together leaders from government, the private sector, and civil society to identify the missing metrics needed to track food systems progress and strengthen decision-making. These engagements generated country-specific theories of change for transformation, and the insights helped inform GAIN’s development of new indicators to better measure food systems transformation across diverse contexts.

GAIN's Making Markets Work program aimed to create enabling environments for public-private engagements to improve nutrition and stimulate investments in safe nutritious foods. We conducted an external review using a custom-built approach grounded in OECD/DAC criteria with systems thinking and human-centered design lenses. Through sensemaking workshops and Circle Conversations with senior management and donors, we identified program strengths and areas for improvement. The evaluation examined progress attribution and produced recommendations for improved design, delivery, and positioning of future programming.

COVID-19 shocked food systems across Sub-Saharan Africa. Movement restrictions, border closures, and interrupted supply chains affected actors from producers to consumers. In response, Canada’s International Development Research Center (IDRC) funded 18 research projects looking at the pandemic’s impact on food systems, the efficacy of mitigation measures, and on long-term responses to build resilience. 

Food Systems Foresight reviewed these projects to summarize trends in the pandemic’s impacts and food systems actors’ responses. We also  facilitated synthesis and sensemaking workshops to help IDRC staff operationalize our findings, which included a rapid landscape analysis of international responses as well as synthesized lessons for policy makers, funders, and researchers for future systemic shocks.

Our team created a “Learning Lab” to support GAIN’s EatSafe program. The program aims to improve food safety in informal markets through improved consumer demand for safe, nutritious food. Our digital Learning Lab made research accessible. It presented key findings through exciting audio and video summaries. These included: original podcasts, webinar remixes, and recorded presentations. We also hosted online discussions which sparked debate among the diverse participants of the Lab.

Businesses have natural incentives to reduce food waste in their operations, but often don’t know the extent of waste at each point in their supply chain.  

We interviewed >40 multinational food companies to understand food loss and waste measurement in their business. 

With a systems lens, we engaged the companies in designing a lean approach to food loss assessment and reduction. We learned that to be compelling, reductions need to link to metrics that support commercial and sustainability goals, so we focused our lean design work there. The research illuminated simple decision-support tools to make sense of the scale of food waste in business operations. 

Emerging markets require systemic approaches to economic development that focus on rural communities. 

We worked with the Chief Executive of a $200M international NGO to explore how market systems approaches can improve programmatic strategies. 

We convened the leaders of more than 70 country operations to raise system awareness and integrate market systems approaches into country-level programming.

COVID-19 revealed many deeply entrenched vulnerabilities within global and national food systems, stressing food markets and the small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that constitute those markets.

We conducted a rapid review of 140+ interventions that have been tested all over the world to support agri-food SMEs in weathering the pandemic and building back better. Analyzing these interventions across a range of systems-informed criteria we offered 8 priority actions for key food systems stakeholders to take, along with country deep dives that seek to apply this analysis to the national context of Kenya and Nigeria.