“Expanding the promotion of local innovation for food security and healthy nutrition to strengthen resilience with focus on women” (ELI-FaNS, 2023–25) is a follow-on project to SULCI-FaNS (Scaling Up Local Capacity to Innovate in Food and Nutrition Security, 2019–22) and has the following objectives:
1. Small-scale farmers (especially women and youth) actively innovate to improve the food and nutrition security and livelihoods of rural communities;
2. Researchers, university lecturers and other relevant decision makers at local, national, subregional and regional level pay more attention to participatory innovation development (PID) approaches and engage in activities to promote PID;
3. Prolinnova structures at all levels are functional and convincingly promote farmer-led joint innovation at local, national and subregional/regional level.
Grassroots-level activities are being implemented in ten action-learning sites in five countries: Benin, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Kenya and South Africa (Limpopo Province). In all the learning sites, the focus is on promoting farmer-led PID in production, processing, marketing and consumption of crop and/or livestock products and in scaling up the PID approach.
This progress report describes project achievements at both the Country Platform (CP) level and the regional level from 1 January to 30 June 2023, the first half-year of the project.
