09 March 2022, Zambia

Objective: To share with stakeholders the outcomes of the project and discuss scale up opportunities.

The Agriculture Consultative Forum (ACF), the FANRPAN node hosting institution in Zambia will be convening a close out dialogue for the GCRF-Agricultural and Food System Resilience: Increasing Capacity and Advising Policy (AFRICAP). The £9.2 million programme has been working to make agriculture and food production in sub-Saharan Africa more productive, sustainable, and resilient to climate change.

Working with local organisations and respective government ministries in Malawi, South Africa, Tanzania and Zambia, the programme has created an evidence base to underpin new country-specific policies in agriculture and food production. This has been achieved through three related strands – scenario planning workshops, cross-disciplinary research and our integrated assessment framework, iFEED

The ACF will host a close out dialogue on 09 March 2022 at Mulungushi International Conference Centre to share with stakeholders the outcomes of the project and discuss scale up opportunities. Funded by the UK Government’s Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF), the programme was launched in Lusaka, Zambia on 25 September 2018 by the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Agriculture.

In Zambia, GCRF-AFRICAP has supported the development and implementation of key national policies and programmes. ACF, the AFRICAP lead partner in Zambia, has led the development of a Soybean Strategy which looks at climate resilience and the food and nutrition security implications of soybeans, the different supply chains that soybeans feed into and the crop’s potential to contribute to the country’s agricultural diversification agenda. The development of the Soybean Strategy is one of a number of commodity-based action plans or strategies planned by the Zambian government.

ACF also carried out a consolidated assessment of the five-year performance of the country’s first National Agriculture Investment Plan (NAIP) and recommended areas of improvement in the design and implementation of NAIP II.

For more information on the AFRICAP project visit https://africap.info/