The Urban Food Futures Scoping Phase took place in three African cities - Ouagadougou, Nairobi, and Cape Town - between 2021 and 2022 with the aim of co-creating innovative pathways to transform urban food systems.

The scoping phase brought together local communities in informal and low-income neigbhourhoods, researchers, grassroots organizations, and academia to address food system challenges affecting the marginalized communities living in these areas. A key objective of this collaborative process was to explore how stakeholders can work together to harness the strengths of groups that are often invisible in urban planning and governance processes. It posed questions about hunger, food justice, and urban food system transformation with a view to revalorizing informality.

Through its partnership with established advocacy organizations whose work focuses on high-density informal settlements and low income areas, the Urban Food Futures programme further sought to challenge conventional research approaches by involving local communities in all research steps. These include:

• Identifying a problem
• Unpacking the root causes of systemic challenges
• Learning from each other
• Co-developing solutions

This webinar will bring together some of the key contributors of the scoping phase to reflect upon some of the significant insights generated throughout this study, including assessing how the collaborative approach amplified the voice of “the researched” by providing spaces to practice their agency and ownership throughout the research process.

Some key insights and findings from the scoping phase that will be expanded upon include:

• How global crises are compounded by local and often individual crises such as income inequality, no access to key public services, and gender-based violence, evictions or domestic migration that place a further stress on a fragile urban food system.
• Why policy makers and other external actors need to rethink urban food and nutrition security from the perspective of those who experience these realities.
• What it takes to facilitate successful social innovations that prioritises and valorize local voices in policy, planning and implementation.
• The role of "Urban Nutrition Hubs" as living labs for addressing immediate food and nutrition needs while also offering communal spaces for co-designing and piloting social innovations to address food system challenges and collectively learn from those processes.