Consuming Urban Poverty Impact Enhancement Project

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.

The long-term vision of this study is to alleviate poverty in African cities through improved urban food governance. The Consuming Urban Poverty project worked closely with local governments, and found that it was necessary to work with broader groups to affect local change. The proposed project therefore engages these three key groups as the primary beneficiaries, in order to achieve our longer-term aim. By targeting these three sets of beneficiaries, the short-term and longer-term possibilities of food governance appropriate to the African urban policy and planning will be enhanced, which will have economic and health benefits for African urbanites. A final beneficiary will be the City of Cape Town.
Direct beneficiary groups
1) Current and future planners: The podcasts and learning materials will meet the needs of current and future planners with an interest, but no formal learning opportunities, in food planning. The six 20-minute podcasts will be scripted in simple language using case studies for accessibility and will be hosted on the project's website, and uploaded onto SoundCloud. The podcasts and associated materials will be disseminated through the project's and associated social media platforms, 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 their curricula, as well as the CUP project partner institutions. Uptake will be monitored by tracking downloads and engagements with social media, as well as the podcast's Q&A space. There will be longer-term engagement with planning schools to assess uptake in teaching.
2) Informal sector advocates will benefit by accessing policy briefs which enhance understanding of role food plays in informal sector and therefore ability to develop responsive advocacy tools. End users will be offered the chance to comment on drafts. Skinner will engage with leadership of the advocacy groups to ensure materials are distributed at meetings, via newsletters and through social media. Uptake will be monitored by the number of downloads and copies distributed, number of hits, feedback from groups.
3) Global Urban Food Policy Actors will benefit by having focussed discussions on the implications of CUP project findings for African urban food governance. It is intended that these discussions will nudge perspectives towards pro-poor African urban food policy. The PI will identify participants in advance and engage prior to meetings in order to understand and accommodate participant perspectives. Meetings will be held at times and places convenient to participants. There will be no short-term impact assessment, outside of soliciting post meeting responses. Long-term assessment will be based on ongoing invitations to the project team to contribute to meetings and policy documents, and evidence of incorporation of project evidence and ideas into policy and framework documents, invitation to contribute to meetings and documents
4) City of Cape Town:
The City will benefit from having ongoing dialogue with the project and access to project resources. This dialogue will benefit the City's nascent food systems governance group as they develop the food systems programme. The project group will regularly meet with officials, assist in interpreting materials for the local context and responding to queries.
Indirect beneficiary groups
The project envisages a wider set of indirect beneficiaries, namely the local governments, urban food system actors and the urban poor. The project will disseminate materials to local government through the ACC's project networks: the CUP project, the Nourishing Spaces Project, Hungry Cities Partnership, African Urban Research Initiative and CUP student workshop attendees.