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Food Security Collaborative Releases New Research
With the world reeling from the food crisis of 2007-2008 and ongoing drought in the Horn of Africa, growing numbers of hungry and malnourished people need sustainable food security programs that build local capacity, turning crisis relief into long-term development.
Farmer organizations that function effectively are key to success.
“As development programs embrace host-country ownership and country-led development, the challenges of institutional strengthening of indigenous organizations loom large,” says ACDI/VOCA Senior VP Paul Guenette.
New Paper from Food Security Collaborative
In a new paper, Building Institutional Capacity to Increase Food Security in Africa, the Food Security Collaborative examines the organizational dimensions of food security, with an emphasis on the oft-overlooked needs of internal management and organizational capacity building.
Comprised of ACDI/VOCA, Management Systems International (MSI), the University of California at Davis and Crown Agents, the collaborative is committed to improve the analysis and implementation of global efforts to enhance the food security of the world’s most vulnerable people. The paper reviews the current challenges facing capacity building for food security programming.
Specific Tools to Enhance Organizational Capacity
The paper recommends that the Feed the Future community and agriculture organizations adopt tools and processes that assess and enhance the capacity of organizations. Specific assessment tools are offered, and contextual factors like a country’s governance are taken into consideration. The paper describes how institutions responsible for system-level coordination, food production and knowledge generation, dissemination and innovation can more effectively be assessed, developed and maintained.
The paper includes a conceptual framework and is written from a practitioner’s perspective that provides a ground-level view of the organizational landscape and the way forward.
ACDI/VOCA’s DNA is in Building Local Capacity to Attain Food Security
ACDI/VOCA has always made food security a priority and is today a leading implementer of the U.S. government’s bold Feed the Future initiative.
“ACDI/VOCA was founded by U.S. farmer cooperatives nearly 50 years ago and has largely built its reputation around helping to organize developing country farmers to collectively access inputs and market services as well as aggregate, add-value to and sell their products. Such collective action is quite possibly their best opportunity to achieve efficiency, improve their commercial prospects and connect to formal markets,” says Guenette.
Read the Building Institutional Capacity to Increase Food Security in Africa paper.
Find out more information on the Food Security Collaborative on MSI's website.
Read more about ACDI/VOCA’s approach to food security.
