According to the 2026 State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report, an estimated 935 million people in sub-Saharan Africa cannot afford a healthy diet. This stark reality underscores one of the region's greatest nutrition challenges: ensuring that nutritious foods are not only available, but also affordable for the people who need them most.
Addressing this challenge requires strong agrifood businesses capable of producing, processing and distributing nutritious foods at scale. This is precisely why the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) launched the Nutritious Foods Financing Facility (N3F).
‘How might AI affect jobs in the food system?’ It was an intriguing question that came up in a recent office conversation — and one that is directly relevant to GAIN’s work that supports equitable and high-quality employment in food systems.
The rise of generative Artificial Intelligence (genAI) in recent years has led to excitement about the potential for higher productivity and new possibilities for what humans, helped by machines, can do – but also to anxiety about job loss, displacement, and inequitable outcomes for workers.
Something significant is happening in food fortification. Quietly, and across more countries than most people realize, the years following passage of a milestone resolution on food fortification at the World Health Assembly have delivered a meaningful acceleration in the scale, quality, and political visibility of large-scale food fortification programs worldwide.
In the current global context of prolonged global conflicts, increasing severity of climate change and ever rising inflation, the need to make our food systems, resilient has never been more urgent than now.
Resilient food systems feed and nourish people, create jobs, protect livelihoods and withstand shocks such as climate change, conflict, rising prices and supply disruptions. And the backbone of what makes food systems truly resilient are the Micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs). They are small individually, but together they form the everyday engine of our food systems.
Food is the foundation of life. It nourishes our bodies, connects communities, and reflects culture and tradition. Yet what we eat must be safe to fulfil its purpose of sustaining health and well-being. Food safety is the set of practices and conditions used to handle, prepare, store, and distribute food in a way that prevents contamination and reduces the risk of foodborne illness. In simple terms, it means making sure food is safe to eat at every stage from production to consumption.
Across Sub-Saharan Africa, most SMEs producing nutritious foods are family-owned enterprises. Often built from modest beginnings, these businesses play an important role in food systems by creating jobs, supporting rural economies, and expanding access to safe and affordable nutritious foods. As these companies grow, the demands for strengthening and streamlining their corporate governance and management structures increase significantly.
Amidst the rising urgency of climate mitigation, strategies remain heavily dominated by the energy, forestry, and transport sectors as the primary sources of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. However, food systems—which account for more than a quarter of Indonesia's emissions—remain on the periphery of climate policy. This critical gap was the focus of the 6th Bincang Pangan Sehat Lestari (BPSL) series held on 11 December 2025. The event brought together experts, policymakers, and practitioners from both government and NGOs to bridge this divide.
When we think about improving nutrition, our minds often jump to the dinner plate: the colourful vegetables, the lean proteins, the whole grains. We focus on consumer choices, dietary guidelines, and the individual responsibility to eat healthily. But what if the most critical decisions shaping our nutrition have already been made long before the food reaches our plate? What if the very food environments where we buy our food are the true starting point for a healthy diet?
Good Nature Agro (GNA), a Zambia-based enterprise with presence in Malawi and South Africa, produces high-quality groundnut and bean seeds and commodities, distributed across Southern and Central Africa, including Zambia, Malawi, Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Namibia. Founded in 2014, GNA has supported over 20,000 smallholder farmers this season with seeds, training and market access to improve incomes and livelihoods.
From its early years, GNA set a target of 40% female farmer representation and invested in key programs to improve female farmers’ experience. Initiatives included co-farmer registration for digital payments, family financial literacy training, pre-harvest payments and loans, asset financing, and gender training for all field staff. These efforts created measurable impacts on productivity and strengthened women’s engagement in high-value markets. Recent surveys confirmed that female farmers continue to experience increased production efficiency and have a positive experience with GNA, reflected in a 60 Decibels net promoter score of 57 (the likelihood of farmers recommending GNA to others, on a scale from -100 to +100).
Food choices play a dual role in shaping both human health and environmental sustainability. At the individual level, diets that lack diversity, fall short of essential nutrients, contain excessive amounts of foods high in sugar, unhealthy fats, and salt, or fail to meet food safety standards, and can have serious negative consequences for health (Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, 2025; World Health Organization, n.d.). At the same time, the ways food is produced and consumed affect the environment, —contributing to land degradation, freshwater depletion, climate change, and biodiversity loss (Crippa et al., 2021; Tilman et al., 2017). These environmental impacts, in turn, influence which foods are available, accessible, and affordable, and can alter the nutrient density of crops (Beach et al., 2019; Smith & Myers, 2018), reinforcing this close connection between our food choices and the environment.
