About GLF Africa 2022
GLF Africa 2022: How to build an equitable, resilient food future brought together over 8,500 participants from 122 countries and featured 182 leading scientists, activists, Indigenous leaders, financiers, youth and government leaders, and 68 incredible partners to explore African solutions to the global food crisis caused by climate change, COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine.
Across 31 plenaries, interactive sessions, launches, virtual tours, dialogues, performances, and a job fair, the digital conference explored ways to transform the future of food through healthy landscapes, equitable access to land, and shorter, greener value chains. Messages on social media rallied 26 million people around concrete ways for Africa to regain its food sovereignty.
3 ways African leadership is transforming food systems
This outcome statement summarizes the conference’s key messages and contains quotes from across the 30 sessions that took place. Insight from all those involved is condensed into 3 key messages:
- Food sovereignty is seen as the ‘motor’ of rural development, which can be addressed through an integrated approach that involves all food actors and their interlinked value-adding activities in the production, aggregation, processing, distribution, consumption, and disposal of food products.
- Leapfrog technologies, brain gain from the continent and the diaspora, local knowledge, and partnerships are key game changers that are already contributing to and accelerating the quest for an African-led food systems transformation.
- There are three key pathways and ‘threads of change’ to be woven throughout the transition: sustainable finance to support smallholders and entrepreneurs throughout markets and value chains; resilient, regenerative landscapes that move beyond restoration and embrace planet-friendly productive systems such as agroecology; and the recognition of landscape rights for local and Indigenous communities.
