The number of adults living with diabetes has more than doubled over the span of 30 years, rising from 7% in 1990 to more than 14% in 2022.1 An estimated 828 million adults worldwide currently live with diabetes, and if trends continue, this is projected to reach 1.3 billion by 2050.2
Imagine a Kenya where vibrant urban markets overflow with indigenous greens, youth in peri-urban areas lead Agri-tech startups, and rural cooperatives thrive as they steward regenerative farming methods. This future was at the heart of a recent co-creation workshop in Kenya, uniting 35 food system leaders from Ministry of Agriculture, Glocolearning, Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), SUN CSA and GAIN to chart pathways toward food systems diversification. Diversification has been widely identified as a strategy with great potential to build better resilience, nutrition, and equity across Kenya.
Fighting malnutrition in all its forms is one of the major challenges of the 21st century. While more than 820 million people suffer from undernutrition and hunger, with 150 million children under age 5 stunted (too short for their age), another 2 billion people are overweight or obese. With SMEs in Africa producing and distributing approximately 70%-80% of the nutritious foods available on the continent, they are key drivers of food supply, job creation and economic growth. How can they reach lower-income consumers and create sustainable nutrition impact?
UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohamed calls for bold action to accelerate food system transformation.
She highlights two key priorities:
1. Helping governments craft high-impact, investible actions.
2. Leveraging aid to unlock concessional loans and mobilize private sector resources for nutrition, food security, climate, resilience, and jobs.
Watch the video to hear her full message
The benefits of trade are often viewed in economic terms, but its human impact — on malnutrition in particular — cannot be ignored. Malnutrition stunts development, weakens immunity, and deteriorates bone and muscle health.
GAIN's Approach to Nutrition-Sensitive Social Protection
Through partnerships, policy advocacy, and programmes, GAIN works in seven countries to make social protection systems more nutrition-sensitive and better equipped to combat systemic and intergenerational inequities that limit the reach of vital services.
Last month the UN Food and Agriculture Organization released its biennial State of Agricultural Commodity Markets report, and we were delighted to see it focusing on a topic close to our own hearts: policy coherence between trade and nutrition.
As part of a team that has been working on nutrition-focused investing for several years, sometimes feeling like we were the only ones at the table, it’s been an exciting few months! Nutrition as an investment theme really seems to be resonating more widely and gaining traction in diverse places.
Food system transformation requires long-term commitment, but we live in a world of short-term political cycles and unforeseen crises that can deter momentum and reset policy priorities. Given that political economy dynamics can stymie efforts to implement food systems transformation agendas, GAIN has partnered with the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) to develop a Political Economy Decision Toolkit that identifies possible bottlenecks ex-ante and utilizes different sets of strategies to overcome them. The Toolkit was informed by discussions with GAIN’s policy advisors across Africa and Asia and revolves around six main domains that can be applied to either a narrow food policy issue, such as expanding school meals programmes, or to a broader topic, such as implementing national food system pathways.
Serving the needs of lower-income consumers requires getting food products to where they are—which often includes remote rural areas as well as underserved urban neighbourhoods. This makes distribution a key, but also costly, aspect of the business model. Using a ‘hub’ model, in which aspects of distribution are grouped together instead of done separately, can improve efficiency and cost-sharing, reducing costs overall.
