Last week, Katharine Vincent and Willem Colenbrander joined colleagues from the Food Systems Transformation in southern Africa for One Health (FoSTA-Health) project in research feedback meetings in Zambia. The FoSTA-Health project is led by the University of Leeds and Wageningen University and Research with a consortium of partners, including Kulima Integrated Development Solutions, that has focused on food systems research in Malawi, South Africa, Tanzania and Zambia.
FoSTA-Health has focused on stakeholder engagement throughout the project lifespan, including a variety of food systems actors. As the project comes to an end, the purpose of the visits was to ensure that knowledge from the project was returned to those stakeholders. A meeting was held with provincial and district officials in Kabwe to feed back findings from food systems mapping and perceptions of the One Health concept and its utility for policy and practice. Further meetings were then held with farmers in Chibombo and Mkushi districts, where feedback on the state of food systems was presented alongside other findings from the projects relating to diets, pests, and biodiversity.
Although the concept of “One Health” is not always widely known, there is widespread agreement with the principles and systems thinking. Across various meetings, one consistent message emerged: food systems transformation requires alignment — between productivity, nutrition and ecosystem stewardship — in a context of climate variability, economic constraint and social change.