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African Urban Harvest pp 1–11Cite as

The Institutional and Regional Context

Abstract

How abundant is Africa’s urban harvest, how much does it help feed and support the 250 million people now living in the continent’s towns and cities? And how could it do this better? These are the questions which this book sets out to answer, and this chapter provides a regional and historical background to the research reported in the book which attempts to answer those questions. Despite the long history of agricultural production in around urban settlements, in Africa as in other parts of the world, this activity has faced technical, institutional and policy constraints, which only recently are beginning to change. The chapter provides an account of the origins of these constraints and why overcoming them can make an important contribution to urban food security and poverty eradication. It locates the present study within a research agenda begun more than 20 years ago which aims to provide evidence of the role of agriculture in the livelihoods of urban and peri-urban households and the changing treatment of this agriculture by city governments.

Keywords

  • Urban Growth
  • Urban Agriculture
  • African City
  • Urban Poverty
  • Stakeholder Dialogue

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Sen’s analysis is concerned with the failure of food entitlements among specific sectors of the developing world as an explanation for famine, rather than simply with food supply or availability

  2. 2.

    Although not discussed here, attention to urban agriculture has also been absent from most national or regional agricultural research organizations and networks in Africa. One notable exception is CORAF/WECARD (West and Central African Council for Agricultural Research and Development), a network of national agricultural research institutes which identifies one of its outputs as strengthening peri-urban systems. In another indication of a changing perspective, the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA) co-hosted a side event on urban horticulture during its 2008 annual meeting.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Urban Harvest, International Potato Center (CIP), Lima, Peru

    Gordon Prain

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  1. Gordon Prain
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Correspondence to Gordon Prain .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. CIP, Urban Harvest, Av. La Molina 1895, La Molina, Lima, Peru

    Gordon Prain

  2. Mazingira Institute, Nairobi, 00800, Kenya

    Diana Lee-Smith

  3. Urban Harvest, CIP, Nairobi, 00100, Kenya

    Nancy Karanja

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© 2010 International Potato Center (CIP)

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Prain, G. (2010). The Institutional and Regional Context. In: Prain, G., Lee-Smith, D., Karanja, N. (eds) African Urban Harvest. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6250-8_1

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