New Digital Platform to enhance Africa’s Resilience, Strengthening Policy Innovation

AKADEMIYA2063 and the Pan-African Farmers’ Organization (PAFO) have launched a new project that will use digital platforms and tools to enhance resilience and strengthen policy innovation.

The Digitally Enabled Resilience and Nutrition Policy Innovations (DERPIn) project launched in Kigali on February 22, 2023, will be implemented by AKADEMIYA2063 on behalf of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH and in collaboration with PAFO and its local partners.

AKADEMIYA2063 is an Africa-based non-profit research organization with headquarters in Kigali, Rwanda, and a regional office in Dakar, Senegal focusing its efforts on the continent’s needs for data and analysis to ensure high-quality policy design and execution.

AKADEMIYA2063 was recently awarded a grant by Germany’s Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) to implement the DERPIn project, which will run for a three-year period in five African countries – Benin, Ghana, Malawi, Uganda, and Senegal.

DERPIn aims to foster the capacity and agility of government planners and private sector operators, including smallholder farmers and their organizations, to craft adapted, gender-sensitive, and impactful policies and programs to advance food systems transformation and enhance resilience to shocks.

It does so through a combination of digitally-enabled, customizable tools, data, and analytical products to cater to the needs of a broad range of stakeholders including the government, the private sector, and most crucially, food systems actors including smallholder farmers.

“With DERPIn, AKADEMIYA2063 proposes the development of a suite of digital solutions to support policy innovations at the intersection of climate change and food and nutrition security in Africa,” said Dr. Ousmane Badiane, AKADEMIYA2063’s Executive Chairperson.

“We are delighted to be implementing this project on behalf of GIZ and optimistic that our collaboration with PAFO will drive the creation of integrated, customizable, and context-specific products and services to guide action by food system actors across the project countries,” Badiane added.

Over three years and initially targeting the above-mentioned five African countries, the solutions proposed in this project will derive from participatory approaches that involve local stakeholders and beneficiaries in the content and format of services and products to ensure relevance and increase accessibility and use. Key target stakeholders range from the government to the private sector, and non-state actors, in particular, smallholder farmers.

“The Digitally Enabled Resilience and Nutrition Policy Innovations (DERPIn) Project will facilitate the production and use of relevant data, analytics, and digital solutions to guide government planners and private sector operators, including smallholder farmers and their organizations, to craft adapted, gender-sensitive, and impactful policies and programs to advance food systems transformation and enhance resilience to shocks,” said Dr. Babafemi Oyewole, PAFO’s CEO.

Oyewole stated that the partnership between PAFO and AKADEMIYA2063 will also facilitate collaboration between the two institutions to improve the policy environment for the agricultural sector and build the capacity of African farmers’ organizations to make evidence-based agriculture and investment decisions and to engage effectively in policy dialogue, mutual learning, and accountability processes under the CAADP.

In particular, the DERPIn project will harness the synergies across several lines of work at AKADEMIYA2063, drawing from the wealth of data, analytical evidence, and tools from concluded, ongoing, and new projects in the areas of growth, poverty reduction, nutrition, vulnerability, trade, gender, remote sensing, and artificial intelligence, notably through two core programs of AKADEMIYA2063: The Malabo Montpellier Panel and Africa Agriculture Watch (AAgWa).