Consuming Urban Poverty Impact Enhancement Project

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The proposed project follows on from the Consuming Urban Poverty Project, which sought to alleviate poverty through the governance of food systems in secondary cities in Africa. While the project was able to demonstrate some impact on local government officials attitudes towards urban food systems, and engage in the shaping of global urban food policies and programmes, the project team realised that to increase commitment to addressing urban food issues in the interest of poverty alleviation it was essential to target external actors who play a pivotal role in shaping local government policy and planning. The project identified three key issues limiting action at the local government scale that can only be addressed by working with external actors. The first was that there was deeply entrenched thinking from planners which hindered pro-poor food planning. Planners no sense of how to act differently, and limited formal training opportunities. The project found limited engagement in food issues by powerful informal economy advocacy groups. Finally, it found a strong bias against informality amongst policy makers, which was unchallenged the global discourses on urban food governance as found in the SDGs, New Urban Agenda and documents from various UN Agencies. Therefore, a three-pronged strategy to affect change in planning, policy through civil society advocacy and global policy discourses.The project has three packages of work aimed to address the key problems identified. The first work package seeks to enhance current and future planners' capacity to incorporate urban food systems into planning in Africa. This will be achieved through the development of a podcast series targeting planners and other urban professionals. The podcast series will be supported by a website that will host links to relevant materials and potentially an interactive platform for engagement, as well as teaching guide for academics to enable them to use the podcasts within the classroom environment. These will be disseminated through the African Centre for Cities, Moving on Empty and Urban Africa social media platforms as well as through LinkedIn groups, through the Association of African Planning Schools network, through the African Urban Research Initiative network, and through the FAO's Food for Cities network. The project will also specifically target academic departments that have demonstrated potential to incorporate urban food into planning and other curricula, as well as the CUP project partner institutions.The second work package seeks to get food onto the informal sector advocacy agenda, through production and dissemination of four policy briefs on the role of food in the informal sector and possible points for advocacy. These will be disseminated to global informal sectors advocacy groups through the Consuming Urban Poverty Project's existing relationships with WIEGO and StreetNet.The third work package seeks to shift global discourse through strategic engagement with key actors shaping discourse and policy direction. This is a refinement of the approach taken in the CUP project in its meeting hosted at Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Centre. The proposed project will host meetings in Washington, New York, Minneapolis, Rome, London and Waterloo, Canada for the key individuals shaping global urban food policy discourse, as identified within the CUP project. These meetings, together with targeted dissemination of project findings and perspectives, will seek to incorporate greater consideration of the relationship between formal and informal components of the food system, urban and sub-urban scale planning for food security, and governance mandates.The project will also use the City of Cape Town as a testing ground for project materials and perspectives, building on existing long-term relationships between project partners and the City and the City's new Resilience Strategy which commits to establishing a food systems programme.