On 25 July, IITA–CGIAR, under the HealthyDiets4Africa Project, funded by the EU, launched its third living lab in Accra as part of its innovative strategies to combat malnutrition in Ghana and beyond by generating access to more diverse diets for target populations and supporting consumers’ dietary changes toward more diverse diets that are safe to consume.
During the opening ceremony, IITA Ghana Country Representative Richard Asare welcomed the partners on behalf of the IITA Director General, Dr Simeon Ehui. He assured them of continued support and access to IITA solutions to enhance their farming activities and food production for optimal productivity. He then introduced IITA and the HD4A project. The program continued with interventions and more highlights of the project and workshop objectives. It also featured expected results with Djana Mignouna, the project convener, on behalf of Rousseau Djouaka, the project leader, before other interventions from Titilayo Falade and Carline Santos. Furthermore, the project partners at the workshop shared an overview of their activities, challenges, and successes concerning food security.
The workshop participants worked towards installing and supporting new innovative living labs for various actors of the food chain—producers, processors, traders, or food industry—focusing on two different aspects prioritized for Ghana: (i) Food safety: SOPs, under-and-over use of pesticides; (ii) underutilized and local foods: conservation, source of seeds, etc.
This will be accompanied by data generation for decisions, advocacy for better-informed nutrition policies, and strategies to shape a societal environment conducive to the diversification of the food system. At the end of the workshop, various action programs for the proper implementation of the project were well defined, with different institutions to be associated with the implementation and an innovative mechanism for conducting the implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of programs and action plans to be put in place.
For the closing of the workshop, Robert Asiedu welcomed the achievement of the objectives of this workshop and noted the richness of the discussions, which were of a high level. Indeed, according to him, it is rare to see such encounters between those who design and develop technologies and those who use them. Finally, the participants were urged to continue to work together to achieve the action plans with SMART indicators within a timeframe. According to him, the interest is the impact the living lab will create.
(Concept of living labs as adopted in HD4A (Steen & van Buren 2017)
Contributed by Djana Mignouna
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