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  • Publication | 2022
Progress in African food systems: What do the data say?
Global Food and Nutrition Security

In a world of commitments, goals, and objectives, what cannot be measured, cannot be managed. New food system monitoring mechanisms are needed, but without reinventing the wheel. The Food Systems Dashboard (FSD) is the most comprehensive effort to gather, screen, organise, and link a large set of existing food system indicators for all countries, including the 55 in Africa. Existing African initiatives to track progress and identify food system opportunities and challenges offer valuable lessons to all regions of the world and can be further enhanced through the use of the FSD. With visibility on supply chains, food environments, nutrition outcomes, and environmental sustainability—the Dashboard can support the robust monitoring of food systems from farm to fork.

In anticipation of the 2022 AGRF, the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) have leveraged their existing partnership to produce this report to provide African leaders with cutting-edge data tools that can be employed to describe their nation’s food systems, diagnose the most urgent areas for action, and decide which evidence-based solutions best suit their needs.

Intended to introduce new innovations in the sphere of food systems data, this report offers a window into publicly available and easy-to-use monitoring functions using the FSD. In doing so, the report takes the first step to apply these tools to the African context.