CGIAR Initiative: West and Central African Food Systems Transformation

The CGIAR Initiative on West and Central African Food Systems Transformation aims to help realize the potential of agriculture to improve nutrition and food security by developing nutritious, climate-adapted and market-driven food systems.

This objective will be achieved through these activities:

• Enabling sustainable intensification and diversification of food production through sustainable seed systems and improved management practices by pursuing demand-creation to promote nutritious foods, co-designing cost-effective, diverse and sustainable production systems and promoting good agricultural practices.
• Managing climate risks and accessing services through informed digital agriculture by creating or improving, contextualizing and complementing existing digital services for small-scale farmers, value chain actors and governments to facilitate informed decision-making. 
• Creating pathways for scaling land and water innovations for resilient agrifood systems by combining participatory tools and citizen science to co-develop and implement inclusive landscapes, owned by communities, that enable sustainable scaling of bundled land, water, aquaculture and climate-smart agronomic and digital innovations. 
• Enhancing youth and women’s entrepreneurship models in food value chains by promoting and preparing youth and women in developing and managing agribusinesses while addressing social barriers.  
• Creating a coherent management system to catalyse the Initiative’s impact at scale, combining state-of-the-art, evidence-based solutions to articulate the demand for research and innovations and increase impact investments.

The Initiative will see the development and scaling of novel and inclusive production and post-harvest technologies, the enabling of participatory decision-making and planning, informed governance, and the strengthening of gender and youth transformative business hubs.