This policy brief seeks to assess the current ‘state of play’ of Guatemala’s national policy discourse with regards to the intersection of climate change, migration, food and nutritional insecurity, and peace and security. It does so through the deployment of a policy coherence and awareness analysis (PCAA) methodology.
The CGIAR Initiative on Aquatic Foods partnered with the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research’s Water Research Institute (CSIR-WRI), the Fisheries Commission, and collaborated with local government departments and local communities to implement fish cage culture in selected small reservoirs in Ghana. This brief highlights the technical and institutional principles that were applied in these sites for inclusive and sustainable aquatic food production in the year 2023.
The Power Walk is a group role-playing exercise designed to prompt reflection on power dynamics, privilege, and social inequalities, adapted for the water sector context. The activity simulates a society where individuals have an equal starting point but depending on their social identities end up in different positions. The game is meant to convey gender equality and social inclusion (GESI) concepts in the water sector.
The new Kenyan government faces a complex domestic and global environment, and it is widely expected to address key food and agricultural challenges with a new set of policies and programs. This policy brief presents key recommendations from a forthcoming book, Food Systems Transformation in Kenya: Lessons from the Past and Policy Options for the Future, which provides research-based “food for thought and action†to support the Kenyan government’s efforts to improve food security.
The whole world has experienced a series of global and local crises since 2019, and Kenya has been no exception. Before the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, poverty and food poverty rates in the country had been declining steadily, falling from 52.3 percent to 36.1 percent and from 38.3 percent to 26.7 percent, respectively, between 1997 and 2016 (KNBS 2007, 2018). Income inequality also declined in the period from 1994 to 2015/16 (KNBS 2020). Estimates suggest that, since then, progress in poverty reduction has reversed, as a result of COVID-19 (Nafula et al.
The report documents the first steps taken to aims to design a “rapid†systemic approach that can be used to better understand the entry points for systems transformation, and innovation bundling. The tool was tested in three countries including Bangladesh, Nepal and Ethiopia. The report documents the steps taken in the case of Ethiopia.
The 2010s were a decade of strong economic development in Kenya. Gross domestic product (GDP)—an indicator of the economy’s size—expanded by an average of 5 percent per year (KNBS 2022). This exceeded population growth and helped raise household incomes, leading to a decline in poverty rates and, more importantly, in the number of poor people, for the first time in at least three decades (World Bank 2022). Agriculture played an important role in this. The sector grew alongside the rest of the economy, despite facing many challenges, including climate variability (Ochieng et al.
This book has adopted a food systems framework as a new way of conceptualizing and designing food policies and research. Looking beyond agriculture and value chains makes it possible not only to turn food systems into a driver of economic transformation but also to better include health, productivity, resilience, inclusivity, and sustainability as integral parts of system transformation. Such a fresh approach is urgently needed in light of limited development progress over the past years in Kenya and other countries.
Climate change represents a major challenge to food systems. It is associated not only with rising average temperatures but also with less predictable weather and changes in humidity, with severe consequences for agricultural production, input markets, aggregation, processing, distribution, and consumption. Negative impacts on food production can raise consumer prices, potentially leading to social unrest and conflict; increased temperatures and changes in humidity require stronger cold chains and improved storage facilities to avoid postharvest damage (de Brauw and Pacillo 2022).
Agricultural inputs, including fertilizers, seeds, breeding stock, crop protection chemicals, machinery, irrigation, and knowledge, are key to innovation and productivity improvement, and are the backbone of any agricultural revolution. They are an integral part of the food supply chain, which comprises the production and distribution of food, and as such a key component of the food system (HLPE 2017).
This paper aligns current thinking on transboundary climate risk pathways with research on climate risk for pastoralists in African rangelands. Four pathways for transboundary transmission of climate risk were used as a framework for a narrative review of research literature on pastoralism and climate change. Selected cases were presented to highlight conclusions and recommendations. Pastoralism research reflects many aspects of risk management, particularly its relationship to mobility and the development of appropriate non-equilibrium models of pastoralist decision-making.
