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With the recent drought in the Horn of Africa, there is a new urgency for sustainable food security programs that build local capacity, turning critical relief into long-term development. In a new paper, Building Institutional Capacity to Increase Food Security in Africa, the Food Security Collaborative examines the organizational dimensions of food security, with an emphasis on the oft-overlooked needs of internal management and organizational capacity building.
Comprised of Management Systems International (MSI), ACDI/VOCA, the University of California at Davis and Crown Agents, the Collaborative is united around a commitment to improve the analysis and implementation of global efforts to enhance the food security of the world’s most vulnerable people.
The Collaborative reviews the current challenges facing capacity building for food security programming and presents tools to assess institutional capacity. The paper recommends that the Feed the Future community and agriculture organizations adopt tools and processes that assess and enhance the capacity of organizations.
Specific assessment tools are offered, and contextual factors like a country’s governance capacity are taken into consideration. The paper describes how institutions responsible for system-level coordination, food production, and knowledge generation, dissemination and innovation can more effectively be assessed, developed and maintained.
The paper includes a conceptual framework and is written from a practitioner’s perspective that provides a ground-level view of the organizational landscape and the way forward.
To read the paper, click on the interactive .pdf below:
