The three strategic goals are achieved through two themes, Climatic-Smart Agriculture (CSA) and Nutrition-Sensitive Agriculture (NSA), supported by institutional capacity strengthening for both institutions and individuals. The themes seek to address nexus challenges presented by climate change and malnutrition in Africa so as to ensure sustainable and resilient transformative changes of agriculture and food systems. Specific attention is given to national and regional issues related to adaptation, mitigation, resilience, production and income, behaviour change, women and youth empowerment, financing, and communities of practice.

FANRPAN’s distinctive comparative advantage lies in the fact that it is an all-inclusive platform that brings together state and non-state actors to work together as equal partners in evidence-based policy development processes and implementation, while remaining sufficiently independent to enable objective evidence-based policy research, analysis and advice. The organization is a multi-stakeholder pan-African network of networks, currently established in 17 countries; operating through an inter-sectoral platform called a ‘node’ in each country. A node comprises a diverse group of organizations that include research institutes, farmer groups, government, media, parliamentarians, private sector and other civil society organizations that have a stake in Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources policies. FANRPAN’s country nodes and wider network provide an unrivalled infrastructure for stakeholder engagement, research dissemination and the embedding of policy and learning.

Over the years, FANRPAN has worked on a range of nexus projects, which have fed into national and continental policy processes. These projects include: Strengthening Evidence-Based Climate Change Adaptation Policies (SECCAP); Evidence Based Policies for Climate Smart Agriculture (EPCSA); the COMESA-funded pan-Africa Civil Society Climate Change Initiative for Policy Dialogues (ACCID); Harmonized of Seed Security Project (HaSSP); and the Agriculture to Nutrition Project (ATONU), among other examples.