EatSafe project to host webinar on food safety innovations for traditional markets

The World Health Organization estimates that every year, 600 million people become ill and many die because of unsafe food. Up to 38% of those affected are children under five years of age, and 53% were people living in low- and middle-income countries.

To address this gap, the Evidence and Action Towards Safe, Nutritious Food (EatSafe) project recently organized an EatSafe Innovation Challenge aimed at encouraging the development of food safety solutions or safer food products towards improving food safety in traditional markets where most consumers in low- and middle-income countries access their food.

On Tuesday 13 December 2022, the EatSafe project will host a webinar to highlight the importance of innovative solutions in food safety, and their applicability to low- and middle-income countries, specifically in traditional markets and along the food value chain.

This webinar is the second part of a series on innovative approaches to food safety. The first webinar, held in January 2022, featured consumer-centred approaches to food safety research.

In this second webinar, speakers will share on the application, implementation and practice of innovative solutions for food safety, including highlights from finalists of the EatSafe Innovation Challenge.

Below are details of the hour-long webinar and how to register.

Date: Tuesday 13 December 2022

Time: 0800 hours EST / 1400 hours CET / 1600 hours EAT

Registration link: https://bit.ly/food_safetywebinar 

Speakers

• Delia Grace, Professor of Food Safety Systems, Natural Resources Institute and Joint-appointed Scientist, International Livestock Research Institute
• Helen Weldemichael, CEO, Safe Dish Ethiopia and Assistant Professor, Wolkite University
• Oyeyemi Fadairo, Project Lead, Solarflex Dryers
• Richard Pluke, Chief of Party, EatSafe project

EatSafe is a project of Feed the Future and the United States Agency for International Development.

Photo credit: Fruit and vegetable shop in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (University of Florida/Geraldine Klarenberg)

 

CGIAR takes centre stage at international conference on innovations and incentives for agricultural research

Celeste Sitoe, a smallholder farmer in Lhate Village, Chokwe, Mozambique (photo credit: ILRI/Stevie Mann).

The research priorities and value chain master plan of the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH) were among the topics discussed at an international conference on innovations and incentives in agricultural research for development, the proceedings of which have just been published online.

Delia Grace, who leads the food safety and zoonoses program at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and the agriculture-associated diseases component of A4NH, gave two presentations at the third annual Agricultural Research for Development conference which took place on 26-27 September 2012 at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU).

In addition to keynote addresses, the conference held parallel sessions that featured the work of several CGIAR Research Programs.

Grace’s first presentation highlighted the synergies between A4NH and the CGIAR Research Program on Livestock and Fish.

Research by the Livestock and Fish program adopts a ‘whole value chain’ approach and is targeted at selected animal-source food value chains with the aim of achieving impact at scale.

The A4NH value chain master plan is premised on four assumptions or hypotheses:

• Nutrient-dense foods in basic diets can have important outcomes
• Informal markets are most important and require risk- and incentive-based approaches
• CGIAR research can work effectively at the demand side
• CGIAR research has potential for consumer education and health

The second presentation focused on innovations and incentives in agricultural research for poor countries and highlighted two cases studies: an innovation that failed (community-based tsetse control in West Africa) and one that succeeded (training of informal sector milk traders in Kenya).

One of the key lessons from the case studies was that while innovations are the lever, incentives are central and value chain actors need to capture visible benefits.

Access the conference proceedings

About the Agricultural Research for Development conference
Agricultural Research for Development is the name of the annual multi/inter-disciplinary and multi-stakeholder conference on agriculture, livestock and forest research in an international development context.

It is organized by four networks: the Swedish Research Network – Sustainable Agriculture and Forestry for Development (Agri4D), the Swedish International Agricultural Network Initiative (SIANI), the Forest, Climate & Livelihood Research Network (Focali) and Future Agriculture.