Feeding Africa’s cities: Opportunities, challenges, and policies for linking African farmers with growing urban food markets

This Africa Agriculture Report 2020 from the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) sets out challenges and opportunities for improving food and nutrition security for cities across Africa. The chapters are written by a variety of experts, with insights and recommendations from public and private sector actors to drive positive change. 

Key messages from the report include:

• Urban food markets offer the largest and fastest growing commercial opportunity available to Africa’s 60 million farms.
• As the center of gravity in Africa’s food system moves to urban areas, new actors — including mayors, city councils, district governments, urban planners, public health officers, and industry trade associations — become central to the effective functioning of agricultural input and output markets, food processing, and food safety systems.
• As a result, effective urban agricultural policy requires new forms of governance, consultation, and coordination.
• This report reviews the structure and scale of urban food markets, current challenges facing farmers and agribusinesses, and key policy prescriptions for ensuring affordable, safe urban food supplies, and broad-based expansion of rural economic opportunity.

And chapters in the report cover the following topics:

1. Overview: Feeding Africa’s Cities: Opportunities, Challenges, and Policies for Linking African Farmers with Growing Urban Food Markets
2. Opportunities in Africa’s Growing Urban Food Markets
3. Competitiveness of African Food Systems with International Imports
4. Domestic food distribution systems: Linking farmers to growing urban markets in Africa
5. Food safety and public health implications of growing urban food markets 101 6 The role of African cities in strengthening agri-food systems
6. Intra-African food trade
7. Improving urban agri-food system governance, performance and opportunities for African farmers to feed the continent’s rapidly growing cities