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The African Economic Research Consortium (AERC) is currently accepting collaborative research proposals for the Policy Analysis for Sustainable and Healthy Food in African Retail Markets (PASHFARM).

Established in 1988, the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC) has become a leading capacity-building institution for advancing research and graduate training to inform economic policy in Africa. The consortium's mandate and strategic mission is based on the fact that sustainable development in sub-Saharan Africa requires well-trained, locally-based professional economists. As a highly integrated knowledge organisation spanning research, training and policy advocacy, AERC is now a vast network of universities, policymakers, researchers, educators and international resource persons.

AERC's collaborative research programme addresses policy-relevant issues and brings together senior researchers from Africa and beyond to generate policy-relevant research. The collaboration enables researchers to tackle complex but contemporary research questions of policy relevance in Africa that could not otherwise be adequately addressed by one or a few researchers, and draws on the diverse skills of the project's various researchers to provide high-quality research results. This call requires multidisciplinary research teams including economists, nutritionists and gender experts, among others, as required by a specific research proposal.

Goal

• Governments and development agencies seek to encourage and increase the consumption of safe, affordable and nutritious diets throughout the year. However, there are many barriers to achieving this goal in sub-Saharan Africa. These include the affordability and accessibility of nutritious food in markets serving low-income consumers, as well as infrastructure constraints. These impose high transportation costs resulting in food waste and unhealthy food destined for lower market segments. This creates an environment of food markets geared towards high-income consumers that supply large volumes of processed, unhealthy or less nutritious food.
• This research project aims to better understand production, how market structures or segmentations can be organised, and then how policies can incentivise market actors, including food SMEs, to provide safe and affordable nutritious food to low-income urban and rural consumers, thus navigating different market segments. The research will cover the sub-Saharan African countries that make up the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC) network. AERC believes that well-functioning markets will boost downstream productivity and upstream revenues. The research activities are expected to generate information on the functioning of food markets for better nutritional outcomes.
• Recently, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) awarded a grant to AERC to undertake rigorous research on Policy Analysis for Sustainable and Healthy Foods in African Retail Markets (PASHFARM) for informed policy development, programme design and improved consumption of healthy foods. This survey is necessary given the sub-optimal food environment in which nutritious food is produced, handled and transported to consumers.

Objectives

• This is a call for expressions of interest to participate in the AERC collaborative research project on policy analysis for sustainable and healthy food in African retail markets. The objectives of this research are to investigate the impact of the food environment and policy on the acquisition and consumption of nutritious food and ultimately on health and nutrition outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa. A better understanding of the food environment pathways will support improved policy making and programme design to improve nutrition outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa. The main domains through which individuals acquire and consume food are personal (accessibility, affordability, convenience and desirability) and external (availability, price, supplier and product properties, marketing and regulation).
• Despite the efforts of governments and development agencies, malnutrition persists among the population of sub-Saharan Africa. The global prevalence of undernourishment and food insecurity has continued to rise despite the UN's Zero Hunger target for 2030. Unhealthy diets are a major cause of non-communicable diseases that contribute directly or indirectly to an increase in obesity and malnutrition. For example, Faria (2022) notes that Rwanda suffered from the most acute malnutrition, with 38.3% of infants not having access to adequate nutrition while 36.8% of children aged 0-4 years suffered from chronic malnutrition in Ethiopia.
• As part of this investment, AERC seeks to build on the lessons learned from a previous nutrition research project (AFPON) and focus studies on the food environment, the role of markets in food supply chains and consumer preferences, prices, affordability and household access to nutritious food in sub-Saharan Africa.

Indicative research topics for competitive grants

• The BMGF-CREE collaborative research project will consider a wide range of proposals that meet the objectives, according to the selection criteria explained. To guide the types of projects that the Corporate Responsibility Project will support, they present an indicative list of topics. These are indicative only and welcome other topics that are consistent with the objectives of the project:
  • Barriers faced by food SMEs in providing safe, affordable and nutritious food to low-income consumers. These include gender-specific barriers that prevent women-owned food SMEs from participating in markets serving low-income consumers.
  • the compliance costs and requirements faced by food SMEs by market segment; the impact of compliance costs on product prices.
  • How governments can support or incentivise food SMEs (including women-owned enterprises) to provide low-income consumers with safe, affordable and nutritious food; how incentive programmes can be designed to overcome the specific barriers faced by SMEs owned by women, young adults or marginalised groups.
  • Impact of price volatility on food expenditure and consumer consumption decisions.
  • Contributions and cost-effectiveness of investments and policies to improve market infrastructure.
  • Information content of foodstuffs in markets and their monitoring mechanisms.
  • Varieties of nutritious foods available in various food outlets and how this availability influences their consumption.
  • Cost-effective policies or programmes to address the affordability constraint of nutritious food.
  • Consumer confidence in food quality by gender and its impact on consumer spending decisions.
  • Policies encourage the purchase of safe and nutritious food and determine whether policies take into account gender differences in consumer perceptions and spending decisions.
  • Factors of accessibility to nutritious diets among low-income groups.
  • Size and growth rate of the RTE food market; the impact of RTE foods on nutritional outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa; and the potential of healthy RTE foods in sub-Saharan Africa.
  • Contributions and cost-effectiveness of investments and policies to improve productivity at the farm level.
• This call is for research proposals for framework papers (i.e. background papers for the AERC collaborative research project on policy analysis for sustainable and healthy food in African retail markets).

Information on funding

• Submitted proposals will be reviewed by external experts and acceptable proposals will be selected for grants of up to USD 40,000 per project. This will be followed by a kick-off workshop involving researchers, resource persons and other selected individuals.
• The researchers will then carry out the research over the course of a calendar year and present their findings at workshops organised by the AERC. The results of the projects are normally published in journals or books by reputable publishers and other outlets and widely distributed.
• Each project will be required to develop at least 1 peer-reviewed paper published in a highly reputable journal and at least 1 full policy briefing with costs that governments may incur in implementing the policy and recommendations for public investment.

Eligibility criteria

• To be eligible, the principal investigator must be a senior researcher who has worked or published extensively in the areas of policy analysis for sustainable and healthy food.
• They are interested in applications that offer innovative use of quantitative, qualitative, experimental or mixed techniques that demonstrate potential to meet programmatic and development needs. Qualified women are encouraged to apply.

For more information, please visitthe AERC website.