African food cities

Proposals are expected to address the following:

• Understanding: promoting multi-stakeholder collaborations in assessing data on food challenges (including harmful marketing and advertising and unequal access to healthy food for the urban poor), and identifying opportunities and indicators in developing urban food policies.
• Engaging: mobilising a wide diversity of food system actors (from farm to fork, the public and private sector, and society, organic and conventional); in particular higher education institutions and research centres to work with local actors in support of evidence-based food policy development and to help provide local solutions to integrated food system challenges.
• Mutual learning: reinforcing or creating new networks of African cities and towns to share good practices and learn from and support each other. This implies also involving cities (in Africa, Europe or elsewhere) with well-developed food policies to provide guidance and lessons learned, as well as new forms of collaboration/twinning.
• Innovation: proposals should envisage a space for mentoring and accelerating innovative business concepts, including social innovation and upscaling in view of African or European food business entrepreneurs with special consideration of women and the diaspora using cascading funding opportunities. Proposals may involve financial support to third parties e.g. to academic researchers, start-ups, SMEs and other multidisciplinary actors, to, for instance, develop, test or validate developed assessment approaches or collect or prepare data sets or provide other contributions to achieve the project objectives. A maximum of EUR 60 000 per third party may be granted. Conditions for third parties support are set out in Part B of the General Annexes. Consortia need to define the selection process of organisations, for which financial support will be granted. A maximum 20% of the EU funding can be allocated to this purpose. The financial support to third parties can only be provided in the form of grants.
• Where relevant, creating links to and using the information and data of the European Earth observation programme Copernicus, the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) and the global Earth observation system of systems (GEOSS).
• Exploring how the food environment can become crisis-proof (whether something can be learnt from or has changed with the COVID-19 crisis) and how to create resilient local, regional food systems with border regimes, which do not disrupt supply chains.
• Governance: developing and evaluating innovative multi-actor urban food systems governance processes and capacities for science-backed integrated policy making and implementation actions that deliver on the international collaboration dimension of the farm to fork strategy objectives and Food 2030 co-benefits for health, environment, climate, circularity and inclusion, while minimizing trade-offs.
• EU-AU partnership: proposals should have a clear plan on how they will collaborate with other projects selected under this topic and similar projects funded under the EU-AU HLPD-FNSSA priority from different funding sources including Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe, ERA-Nets, African Union research grants, DeSIRA or PRIMA. They should contribute to the work of the FNSSA-working group (WG) by linking to the LEAP4FNSSA project supporting the FNSSA-WG secretariat. They should participate in joint activities, workshops and as common communication and dissemination activities and show potential for upscaling. Applicants should plan the necessaryfunding to cover these activities.
• Social innovation is recommended when the solution is at the socio-technical interface and requires social change, new social practices, social ownership or market uptake. This topic should involve the effective contribution of SSH disciplines.