ACU participates in a new four year food, nutrition and agriculture project

LEAP4FNSSA (Long-term EU-AU Research and Innovation Partnership for Food and Nutrition Security and Sustainable Agriculture).

The ACU is delighted to be participating in LEAP4FNSSA, an important new EU–funded project. Supporting the shared African and European policy of increasing collaboration in research and innovation, it focusses on common interests around food, nutrition and agriculture.

Under the coordination of CIRAD (Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement) this four year policy support project has brought together an impressive union of 35 organisations, universities, research agencies, civil society bodies and national authorities with complementary expertise from across both continents.

Together this alliance will reinforce the existing Africa-Europe partnership on food and nutrition security and sustainable agriculture (FNSSA). Its goal is to translate the current relationship into a more tangible and long-term, multi-stakeholder platform for collaboration on FNSSA. This puts into action one of the strategic objectives of the Africa-Europe High-Level Policy Dialogue on Science, technology and Innovation.

The venture builds on several previous projects including CAAST-Net Plus coordinated by the ACU, and RINEA in which the ACU was a partner.

The ACU’s role in LEAP4FNSSA, alongside the African Union’s Observatory on Science, Technology and Innovation (AOSTI), is to co-lead the development of a monitoring, evaluation and learning framework for the new bi-regional platform. Working with a team of experts from across Africa and Europe the ACU will implement the concept it developed under the RINEA project, beginning in early 2019 with a baseline study on bi-regional cooperation on FNSSA prior to the partnership’s emergence.