Rethinking Food Markets Initiative: Stakeholders Workshop in Nigeria
The CGIAR Initiative on Rethinking Food Markets led by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), organized a two-day (12-13 Dec. 2022) stakeholders workshop in Abuja, Nigeria. The workshop aimed to engage with key stakeholders to kick-start the co-designing of innovations and interventions in ‘Food Markets and Value Chains’ to enhance employment opportunities and increase income for smallholders and SMEs along the agri-food value chains in Nigeria. Specifically, the workshop’s objectives are: (1) to introduce the initiative to policymakers, implementing partners, and scaling stakeholders in Nigeria; (2) to share the findings from the Scoping Study in Nigeria with stakeholders and validate the results; (3) to co-identify and co-design innovations and interventions with partners for piloting in Nigeria; and (4) to kick-start bundling of innovations/interventions and learning between the different work packages within the Initiative.
About 50 participants were drawn from the public sector (Federal and state Ministries of Agriculture); research institutes; private sector stakeholders from food value chains and logistics service providers; cooperative societies; farmers associations; value chain aggregators; agrotechnology organizations; and financial services providers in the agri-food sectors attended the workshop. The workshop was co-facilitated by IFPRI senior researchers Dr. Bedru Balana, Research Fellow and the Initiative’s Country Coordinator in Nigeria; Dr. Futoshi Yamauchi, Senior Research Fellow; Hyacinth Edeh, IFPRI-Nigeria Country Program manager and the monitoring, evaluation, learning, impact assessment and scaling preparedness and actions (MELIA&SPA) team (Dr. Minh Thai and Dr. Mijra Michalscheck) from the International Water Management Institute (IWMI).