Africa Food Systems Forum

Africa Food Systems Forum

Africa’s Food Systems Forum, formerly AGRF, is the world’s premier forum for African agriculture and food systems, bringing together stakeholders to take practical actions and share lessons that will move African food systems forward. Africa Food Systems Forum is designed to energise political will and advance the policies, programs, and investments required to achieve an inclusive and sustainable food systems transformation.

Leveraging GAIN’s Human-Centered Design (HCD) Toolkit to Boost the Nutrition Impacts of Social Protection

Leveraging GAIN’s Human-Centered Design (HCD) Toolkit to Boost the Nutrition Impacts of Social Protection

Improving the nutrition impacts of social protection requires targeted improvements to programme designs. GAIN believes that good social protection design involves meaningfully leveraging vulnerable beneficiaries’ voices. Doing so can help administrators better understand how to overcome constraints and address beneficiaries’ specific nutritional needs. Beneficiaries have the advantage of proximity to the key issues: they understand their specific constraints and challenges better than any other system actors. While the need to incorporate beneficiaries’ perspectives, and the value of doing so, is well accepted by social protection administrators, they often face substantial hurdles to doing so in practice: logistical constraints, language barriers, differing value systems, power dynamics, and other factors make meaningful engagement with beneficiaries a significant challenge. GAIN has set out to identify ways to support administrators to overcome these constraints, particularly through human-centered design (HCD).

Human-Centered Design (HCD) Toolkit 

Boosting the Nutrition Impacts of Social Protection

Human-Centered Design (HCD) can help social protection administrators better design for beneficiaries’ nutritional needs. HCD is a set of approaches, methods, and mindsets that can be used to develop innovative solutions by placing the end-user firmly at the core of the design process. Rooted in empathy for the user’s experience, HCD makes space for creative exploration of new ideas and iterative testing and improvement of potential solutions based on users’ input. In social protection contexts, HCD can amplify the voices of the beneficiaries in design processes, and give administrators robust insight into the solutions that can be most effective for reaching their nutrition objectives.

GAIN has developed an HCD Toolkit that offers governments and other system actors a consolidated set of resources to support the effective adoption and mainstreaming of HCD in social protection systems. The Toolkit can be used in design processes to overcome the traditional obstacles that actors face in engaging beneficiaries, enabling more meaningful and productive integration of their perspectives in social protection design processes. The Toolkit offers administrators complete, context-adaptable guidance for integrating HCD into their design processes in the form of three complementary resources:
 

  1. An HCD ‘Toolbox’ consisting of 21 distinct, customisable tools spread across four process phases: Plan, Listen, Ideate and Test
  2. A selection of pre-defined design ‘Journeys’, based on the users’ unique objectives, that provide a blueprint for designing their HCD process and selecting the tools relevant to their context
  3. A comprehensive Facilitator Manual and Context Adaptability Guide that offers detailed insight into HCD process implementation and guidance for tailoring the tools to meet users’ specific needs

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Scaling Up Nutrition Business Network (SBN) commits to combat malnutrition in all its form in Benin

Scaling Up Nutrition Business Network (SBN) commits to combat malnutrition in all its form in Benin

Micronutrient deficiencies, particularly anaemia and vitamin A deficiency, persist among children and women. Three out of four children suffer from anaemia, while one in three from vitamin A deficiency. While one in two women suffer from anaemia. obesity[3] is rising, impacting approximately 26% of women aged 15 to 49. This increasing trend in obesity also affects young people, especially women. As of 2021, Benin ranks 166th out of 191 countries in the Human Development Index, highlighting untapped development potential.
Youth Leadership Initiative

Youth Leadership Initiative

The Youth Leadership Initiative aims to enable young people aged 18-25 to play a pivotal role in shaping food systems, through leadership and collective action with a special focus on national and global decision-making.  

What the 2025 Nutrition for Growth (N4G) Summit in Paris is all About?

What the 2025 Nutrition for Growth (N4G) Summit in Paris is all About?

This discussion will look at what we're expecting from global leaders during the N4G summit. What kind of commitments do we want to see? How can we mobilise the international community around the issue of nutrition, bring in the private sector and civil society, and get back on track to fulfil the UN's sustainable development agenda?
Leading the Change: GAIN at the Forefront of Indonesia's Green Economy Expo

Leading the Change: GAIN at the Forefront of Indonesia's Green Economy Expo

GAIN Indonesia was at the forefront of Green Economy Expo held by The National Development Planning Agency (BAPPENAS) on July 3-5 in Jakarta. This year’s theme was “Advancing Technology, Innovation, and Circularity”. The event brought to the forefront discussions on sustainable development and the implementation of circular economy principles throughout Indonesia.
Nutrition for Growth (N4G) Summit

Nutrition for Growth (N4G) Summit

Built on our efforts at Tokyo N4G, GAIN will try to harness the capacity of the private sector to transform food systems and tackle malnutrition. Businesses large and small are the main drivers behind the action, investment, and financial flows that supply our diets everywhere. By providing an open platform for meaningful dialogue, we aim at achieving impactful and measurable results with consumers, government, investors, and markets.
Reaching Lower-Income Consumers with Nutritious Foods: Bespoke Last-mile Distribution Networks

Reaching Lower-Income Consumers with Nutritious Foods: Bespoke Last-mile Distribution Networks

Final distribution to the consumer is a key challenge in addressing affordability for lower-income consumers, particularly in rural and remote areas or crowded lower-income urban neighbourhoods. One way to address this, particularly in places where there are few existing retail outlets, is through creation of a bespoke last-mile distribution (LMD) network. Creating such a network involves recruiting and training distribution/sales agents; equipping them for the job; and providing them with appropriate pay, incentives, and supervision. The agents can be employees, contactors, or micro-franchisees and can sell on foot, bike, using a pushcart or adapted motorcycle, from their homes, or through stalls.