Taking African food systems leadership to AFSF 2026

by Ledama Masidza/

Taking African food systems leadership to AFSF 2026

Ledama Masidza

Stella Odhiambo & 
Ledama Masidza

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From the exhibition floor to the Youth Dome, our Fellows brought the voices and experience of people leading change across Africa’s food systems into the heart of the Forum.

The Africa Food Systems Forum (AFSF) is one of the biggest gatherings on Africa’s food systems calendar. Through our work with the African Food Fellowship (AFF), this year in Kigali we brought together Fellows, food systems leaders and partners across five packed days. Alongside the Forum itself, which ran from 1 to 4 September, the Africa Food Festival created a space for food, culture and everyday experience to sit next to the policy conversations happening inside.

The week opened with one of its biggest moments: the graduation of 27 Fellows from our 5th Rwanda cohort, held as an AFF side event just before the Forum. It marked another milestone in a growing network of more than 300 food systems leaders across Rwanda, Kenya and Zambia: people working across agriculture, nutrition, markets, climate, policy and other parts of the food system, and increasingly, working together across those boundaries.

Ledama Masidza with the fellows at the AFF booth
Ledama Masidza with the fellows at the AFF booth

There was a booth run by Fellows. Visitors came from across the continent, from Nigeria, The Gambia and Senegal to Uganda and Tanzania. Among those who stopped by to meet our Fellows were His Excellency Mokgweetsi Masisi, former President of Botswana, and Rwanda’s Prime Minister, Dr Justin Nsengiyumva, accompanied by the Minister of Agriculture and Animal Resources, Dr Telesphore Ndabamenye. More than 70 people signed up to stay connected with the Fellowship, and others put a direct question to the team: when is AFF coming to my country?

HE Mokgweetsi Masisi, former president of Botswana learning more about the work of the fellows
HE Mokgweetsi Masisi, former president of Botswana learning more about the work of the fellows

We also took our Food Systems Leadership Programme to the Youth Dome for an AFF masterclass. Fellows spoke from their own experience of leading change in their part of the food system, which kept the conversation grounded in what leadership looks like day to day.

The thread running through the session was: If Africa is serious about transforming its food systems, it needs to invest in the people who are already doing the work, and give them the leadership skills, relationships and spaces to collaborate. Coming from Fellows living that every day, the message seemed to carry real weight.

Beyond our own spaces, Fellows were active throughout the Forum programme, speaking at sessions and taking part in conversations from school feeding and nutrition to land governance, post-harvest losses and circularity.

We came away with plenty to think about, especially what it takes to turn a growing continental network into collaboration on the ground. We’ll be sharing more of those insights soon. In the meantime, find out more about the Fellowship and the leaders behind it at africanfoodfellowship.org.

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African Food Fellowship welcomes its first cohort of Zambian leaders

by Jacqui Kubania/

African Food Fellowship welcomes its first cohort of Zambian leaders

Jacqui Kubania

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The African Food Fellowship has welcomed its first cohort of 34 food systems leaders in Zambia, marking a super exciting new chapter in the Fellowship’s growth across Africa.

The Food Systems Leadership Programme, delivered by Wageningen University & Research and Wasafiri, combines systems thinking, leadership development and practical problem-solving to help African leaders work together to transform food systems.

The new cohort brings together professionals working across Zambia’s food system, from food production and distribution to advocacy. Together, they will focus on improving access to healthy and nutritious food, building inclusive markets and trade, and strengthening food systems resilience.

Zambia’s first cohort marks an important step towards the African Food Fellowship’s ambition to build a pan-African network of leaders working towards healthier, more inclusive and sustainable food systems.

As Wasafiri, we’re proud to be part of this growing movement, working alongside the Fellowship and its partners to equip African leaders to make lasting change happen.

Image courtesy of the African Food Fellowship

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Strengthening maternal health systems in northern Kenya

by Robinson Karuga/

Strengthening maternal health systems in northern Kenya

Robinson Karuga & Stella Odhiambo

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Through the UK-funded Healthy Women, Children and Newborns programme, Wasafiri supported efforts to strengthen maternal and newborn health systems in Marsabit and Isiolo counties. In this piece, Robinson Karuga reflects on what it takes to strengthen systems in complex environments. In this case, helping different actors work better together to support mothers and newborns in northern Kenya.

Bringing the system into focus

In Kenya’s northern counties, distance can be the difference between life and death.

For mothers experiencing complications during pregnancy or childbirth, reaching a health facility in time is often the biggest challenge. In counties like Marsabit and Isiolo, long travel distances, limited infrastructure and fragile referral systems have historically made maternal emergencies particularly dangerous.

“The distance between the county headquarters and the farthest point of Marsabit is the equivalent of Limuru to Mombasa,” explains Robinson Karuga. “Now imagine a woman developing complications at that farthest point, on rough roads, in an area prone to insecurity, with no specialist within reach.”

Improving maternal and newborn health outcomes in these contexts requires stronger systems: better coordination, clearer data, and faster ways to move patients through the health system when emergencies arise.

In 2024, the UK government launched the Healthy Women, Children and Newborns programme to strengthen maternal and newborn health systems in Kenya. As part of this work, Wasafiri was commissioned to support the programme’s technical design in Marsabit and Isiolo counties.

The focus was not simply to introduce new tools, but to help counties better understand the realities shaping maternal and newborn health outcomes and prioritise practical actions grounded in data.

What Robinson and the team encountered quickly revealed how layered the challenge really was.

Marsabit is Kenya’s largest county by landmass, with dispersed communities and overstretched health facilities, particularly in remote sub-counties where specialist care is limited. Cultural practices also meant that many deliveries still happened at home, with traditional birth attendants often only escalating cases once complications had become severe.

“The figures we were seeing were already devastating,” Robinson says. “But they were just a fraction of the real number. A lot of it slipped through the cracks.”

For Robinson, one of the biggest issues was fragmentation.

“Different partners were doing important work, but there wasn’t always a shared roadmap guiding how those efforts came together,” he explains.

Root cause analysis and change planning exercises in Isiolo ana Marsabit
Root cause analysis and change planning exercises in Isiolo ana Marsabit

Building around the realities on the ground

The work focused on helping counties prioritise the actions most likely to strengthen maternal and newborn health systems.

This meant bringing together county officials, health facility staff, programme partners and community representatives to build a clearer picture of the systemic challenges and agree on practical priorities.

Robinson recalls that one of the first steps was sitting down with county health management teams and reviewing the data they already had.

“We didn’t want to use guesswork,” he says. “We asked them to present all the data they had collected over the previous year. From there, we could identify the biggest problems and prioritise them.”

What emerged from those sessions revealed the importance of stronger coordination and more grounded planning processes. In some cases, county plans had become routine exercises rather than practical tools for decision-making, while technical and political actors were not always aligned around the same priorities.

To address this, the work went beyond technical planning. Through facilitated workshops, stakeholder mapping exercises and root cause analysis, Wasafiri helped to develop more practical, costed action plans shaped around local realities.

For Robinson, one important lesson was that maternal health outcomes are influenced by far more than the health sector alone.

“The Ministry of Roads should understand that bad roads are also a maternal health issue,” he reflects. “And agriculture should think about nutrition not just as production, but as survival and thriving. These problems are connected.”

That systems perspective became a central part of the work.

One workshop exercise asked health teams to map all the actors whose decisions influenced maternal health outcomes, from county officials and parliamentarians to infrastructure and agriculture actors.

“They had never really thought about working with roads, with agriculture, or even with MPs through that lens before,” Robinson says. “It was eye-opening.”

Root cause analysis and change planning exercises in Isiolo ana Marsabit
Root cause analysis and change planning exercises in Isiolo ana Marsabit

Signs of a stronger system

Health systems change gradually, particularly in contexts facing longstanding structural challenges. Robinson is candid about some of the realities the programme encountered.

During parts of the project, staffing and resource constraints made it difficult for some county teams to consistently participate in planning processes. At the same time, many of the challenges being addressed had developed over many years and could not realistically be resolved through a single intervention.

“Sometimes the best thing you can do is plant seeds and create a critical mass of people who want to solve the problem. But these things require time."

Robinson Karuga

Even so, several of the approaches supported through the programme continue to shape maternal and newborn health efforts in northern Kenya.

In recent years, Kenya has expanded investment in emergency maternal referral systems such as m-Mama, a digital transport coordination model designed to reduce delays for mothers experiencing complications during pregnancy and childbirth.

At county level, investments in maternal health infrastructure have also continued. In Marsabit, the county government recently opened a new maternity wing at Laisamis Hospital, including a neonatal unit and surgical theatre intended to improve access to emergency maternal care in remote areas.

At the same time, digital monitoring systems are becoming increasingly central to maternal health delivery across Kenya, helping counties strengthen visibility of maternal and newborn health indicators and improve decision-making.

For Robinson, these developments reinforce an important lesson from the work in Marsabit and Isiolo.

“Tools alone don’t transform health systems,” he explains. “What matters is creating processes that help people align around shared priorities and act on better information.”

Why systems work matters

Maternal and newborn health challenges in remote regions rarely have simple solutions. They require coordination between governments, health facilities, communities, and development partners, often across vast and difficult landscapes.

Programmes like this highlight how technical support, when focused on system design and collaboration, can help create the foundations for longer-term change.

And while progress can be uneven, the experience in Marsabit and Isiolo offers an important reminder: strengthening the systems that support maternal health can ultimately save lives.

Work like this highlights how thoughtful system design can help complex initiatives move from ambition to coordinated action.

If you are working to design or strengthen programmes that aim to deliver lasting impact, Wasafiri would welcome a conversation.

Photo by Meshack Enock Mwakibuja

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What Will It Take to Scale Healthy School Meals in Kenya?

by Felistus Mwalia/

What Will It Take to Scale Healthy School Meals in Kenya?

Felistus Mwalia

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Earlier this year, in an opinion piece published in The Standard, Dr. Jacqueline Kung’u, Nutrition Scientist at the African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC), argued that Kenya’s school meals must deliver more than full stomachs.

While expanding feeding to more learners is a significant achievement, success should ultimately be measured by the nutritional quality of the meals children receive. As she noted, providing any meal is not enough; school meals must deliver the nutrients children need to grow, learn, and thrive.

Beyond improving attendance and retention, nutritious school meals contribute to better dietary quality, learning outcomes, and long-term health.

Dr. Kung’u highlighted local sourcing as one practical way of improving the nutritional quality of school meals, drawing on evidence from a study by Mwanthi et al. in Makueni County, which found that engaging smallholder farmers in school feeding programmes increased children’s access to fresh, locally produced foods.

She also noted that Brazil provides another compelling example. Its National School Feeding Programme requires that at least 30 percent of food served in schools be procured directly from local farmers, helping diversify school menus while creating stable markets for local producers.

In this context, APHRC and its partners have spent the past two years generating evidence on how locally sourced school meals can improve children’s nutrition while creating opportunities for local food producers.

Through the International Development Research Council (IDRC)-funded project Leveraging School Feeding and Micro and Small Enterprises to Promote Access to Healthy and Sustainable Food among the Urban Poor in Kenya and Rwanda, APHRC, Wasafiri, Imperial College London and the University of Rwanda worked with governments, schools, communities, micro and small enterprises (MSEs), and smallholder farmers (SHFs) to strengthen local procurement systems, support policy reform, build the capacity of local suppliers, and increase demand for healthy, locally produced foods.

The project organized 105 MSEs and SHFs into three formally registered Local Business Associations (LBAs) across Kibra, Korogocho, and Mukuru, strengthened policy dialogue at national and county levels, established a multi-stakeholder Technical Working Group, and demonstrated that locally sourced school feeding can simultaneously improve children’s nutrition, strengthen local livelihoods, and create more resilient food systems.

These achievements laid the foundation for the next phase of the work. With support from the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) Scaling for Impact (S4I) programme, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), APHRC and Wasafiri are now building on these lessons to strengthen locally sourced, healthy and sustainable school meal systems in Nairobi’s informal settlements.

The focus has shifted from demonstrating what works to identifying how successful approaches can be scaled through stronger local procurement systems, greater participation of MSEs and SHFs, community demand creation, and supportive policy environments.

This work comes at a critical time as Kenya seeks to expand access to school meals nationwide by 2030.

As part of this process, the partners convened the Scaling the Integration of Micro and Small Enterprises and Smallholder Farmers into School Meals Programmes in Urban Informal Settlements in Kenya Mid-Year Scaling Reflection Workshop.

More than a progress meeting, the two-day workshop was designed as a collaborative problem-solving forum. It brought together representatives from national and Nairobi County government, schools, researchers, development partners, Local Business Associations (LBAs), MSEs, and SHFs to review progress, identify the key barriers limiting scale-up, prioritise the conditions needed for success, co-develop practical solutions, and agree on priority actions for the next phase of implementation.

What emerged from the workshop was that scaling healthy school meals is not primarily a nutrition challenge; it is a systems challenge. Kenya already has nutrition guidelines and a growing policy commitment to school feeding. The remaining challenge is ensuring that schools can consistently access nutritious, locally produced foods through reliable supply chains.

Participants repeatedly identified LBAs as the missing link. Organised local businesses can aggregate produce from smallholder farmers, improve food safety, stabilise supply and prices, and create stronger market opportunities. However, this requires investment in governance, procurement readiness, financial management, food safety, business formalisation and stronger partnerships.

Participants proposed practical actions including developing aggregation models, reviewing school menus alongside costs, strengthening payment systems between schools and suppliers, and improving the business capacity of LBAs.

Another important discussion challenged the assumption that awareness is the main barrier. Participants argued that schools already know healthy meals matter. The bigger challenge is behaviour.

Financial constraints, entrenched routines, and competing priorities often mean menus prioritise filling stomachs rather than meeting nutrition guidelines.

Instead of awareness campaigns alone, participants recommended practical behaviour-change approaches including cooking demonstrations, showcasing successful school gardens, reviewing menus against national guidelines, engaging parents and school management, and strengthening food safety throughout the value chain. This is exactly what this project aims to do under “demand-creation” activities that Community Organized Groups (COGs) will lead.

Governance also emerged as a critical issue. Many low-cost private schools struggle to navigate Ministry of Education registration requirements and procurement processes, while menu decisions are often concentrated in the hands of school directors and the board of management. Participants agreed that supporting schools to implement existing policies may be just as important as developing new ones.

Moving beyond full stomachs to healthy, nutritious school meals is no longer just an aspiration; it is an achievable policy and development agenda. The workshop underscored that success will depend on coordinated action across government, research institutions, the private sector and communities to strengthen local procurement, empower LBAs, support smallholder farmers, and improve implementation of existing policies.

By investing in these interconnected systems, Kenya has an opportunity to build a school meals programme that delivers multiple dividends: better nutrition and learning outcomes for children, sustainable livelihoods for local producers and enterprises, and more resilient, inclusive food systems. That is the true promise of scaling healthy school meals.

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When the Ocean Agenda Came Home: Reflections from Wasafiri’s first Our Ocean Conference

by Ledama Masidza/

When the Ocean Agenda Came Home: Reflections from Wasafiri’s first Our Ocean Conference

Ledama Masidza
Ledama Masidza

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There is something quietly significant about where a conversation happens.

For more than a decade, the Our Ocean Conference has gathered governments, scientists, businesses, philanthropies, youth movements and coastal communities to shape the future of the world’s oceans. This year, for the first time, that conversation came to Africa – to Mombasa, on Kenya’s Swahili Coast.

That matters. Not only because of geography, but because some of the most important ocean stories are already being written here.

The theme, “Our Ocean, Our Heritage, Our Future,” carried particular weight on this coastline, where the ocean is not scenery or science alone. It is food, livelihood, culture, history and identity. It is also pressure – warming seas, plastic pollution, declining fisheries, and the uneven promises of a growing blue economy.

For Wasafiri, this was a first, and we arrived the way you do at any new table – ready to listen.

Stepping into ocean work is not a departure from what we do. It is a natural extension of it. Our work has always sat in the messy middle of change, where no single organisation, government department, funder or community can solve a problem alone. We help people make sense of complexity, build coalitions, learn as they act, and turn shared ambition into coordinated action.

The ocean needs exactly this kind of connective work – because marine conservation is not one issue. It is a whole system, tied to food security, local economies, climate resilience, governance and the futures of young people. The ocean simply makes that impossible to ignore.

I came in with my own lens too. I am a Kenyan marine conservationist, food systems practitioner and filmmaker, but much of my work has been about something simpler and harder to measure: helping people, stories and efforts find each other.

Through working with organisations like Oceans Alive and the Kenya Ocean Guardians Network, I have seen how much powerful ocean work already exists here. I have also seen how often it happens in isolation. A community restores a reef. A school builds ocean literacy. A youth group tells new stories. A beach management unit works to strengthen governance – usually with passion, trust and far too little funding.

The challenge is rarely that there is no action. More often, the challenge is that the action is fragmented.

That was one of my strongest reflections from the week. The rooms were full of ambition. Globally, more than 320 new commitments worth roughly US$6.4 billion were announced, and Kenya, as host, made significant pledges of its own.

There were real milestones: the Mombasa Declaration on fisheries and transparency, regional commitments to expand marine protected areas, and growing support for a precautionary pause on deep-sea mining.

These commitments matter. They signal political will, and they can unlock finance, attention and new partnerships. But standing in Mombasa, close to the communities and ecosystems they are meant to serve, one question was unavoidable: how do we make sure they reach the water?

How do they reach the reef, the fisher, the young person looking for a future in ocean work, the woman processing the day’s catch, the small organisation trying to keep a programme alive, the community that protected a place long before it appeared in any policy document?

Some of the most meaningful moments were not on the main stage at all. They were in the exhibition halls and side conversations – between fishers and policymakers, researchers and community groups, youth leaders and funders.

It was powerful to attend a PAKPRO session reframing marine plastic pollution in Kenya’s Coast by placing coastal communities, informal waste actors, women, youth cooperatives, and fisher communities at the centre of the circular economy conversation, not as victims, but as people already leading practical solutions.

What I took from Mombasa is that marine conservation is entering a new chapter. The language is shifting from awareness to delivery, from isolated projects to collaboration, from conservation for communities to conservation with them. But that shift is not guaranteed. It will depend on whether finance becomes genuinely accessible, whether local leadership is recognised as expertise, and whether we are brave enough to ask who benefits from the blue economy – and who carries its costs.

For me, the feeling of the conference was hope with teeth. There was beauty, pride and real energy along the coast. But there was also impatience, the good kind – the kind that says we have had enough elegant language, and now we need to see it reach the water.

Wasafiri’s role in this next chapter is not to arrive with all the answers. It is to help ask better questions, connect the right people, and bring our experience in systems change to a field that urgently needs it.

If systems change begins with relationships, then the conversations we started in Mombasa are only the beginning.
The ocean agenda has come home to Africa. Now the work is to make sure it does not leave communities behind.

And if you are part of this work too – restoring a coastline, telling a new story, holding a fragile programme together – we would love to find each other.

Image by Kanenori from Pixabay

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Why we believe lived experience should shape decisions

by Aisha Adan/

Why we believe lived experience should shape decisions

Aisha Adan

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Lots of programmes struggle because the people closest to the problem rarely shape the decisions intended to solve it. In this conversation with Wasafiri’s Inclusion Lead Aisha Adan, we explore why meaningful inclusion matters for systems change.

Across our development and systems change work, participation is often treated as evidence of inclusion. Communities are consulted, workshops are held, and feedback is gathered. Yet, as Aisha Adan explains, being present in a room does not necessarily mean having influence over the decisions being made.

For Aisha, one of the biggest reasons programmes struggle to create lasting change is that they are often designed far from the realities they aim to address. Decisions are shaped by technical expertise, institutional incentives and donor timelines, while the lived experiences of those most affected remain peripheral to strategy and action.

“In complex systems, what really matters is power,” Aisha reflects. “And the people most affected by these problems are often the least influential over programme design, resource allocation and decision-making processes.”

Why isn’t participation enough?

Aisha believes that many institutions still misunderstand what meaningful inclusion requires. For Wasafiri, strengthening inclusion in systems change means creating the conditions for historically excluded groups to genuinely shape priorities, decisions and resources.

“It’s not about how many people are invited into a meeting,” Aisha explains. “It’s about whether those people can meaningfully influence what happens next.”

This requires recognising that different groups experience systems differently and operate within unequal power structures. It also requires treating lived experience as a legitimate and valuable form of evidence alongside technical expertise and data.

From a systems perspective, no single actor holds a complete picture. Better strategies emerge when diverse perspectives help reveal the political realities, relationships and practical conditions shaping how systems actually function.

Aisha
Aisha Adan

What the communities in northern and coastal Kenya showed us

Drawing on Wasafiri’s work through the Nawiri programme in northern Kenya and later experiences connected to the CREATE initiative on the coast of Kenya, Aisha reflected on how exclusion shapes programme decisions and outcomes.

The work revealed that exclusion was political, geographic, generational and gendered. Yet women, young people and pastoralist communities who held deep insight into the drivers of vulnerability and conflict remained excluded from key decision-making spaces.

Through community-led research and dialogue processes, Wasafiri also saw how lived experience frequently challenged institutional assumptions.

Communities highlighted how insecurity, mobility and weak trust in institutions shaped the choices they made and influenced how they navigated everyday realities. These perspectives often exposed dimensions of the system that external actors had poorly understood.

For Aisha, the experience reinforced a critical lesson: even well-intentioned programmes risk reinforcing the very dynamics they hope to change when they fail to understand how power operates within a system, whose knowledge counts, and who gets excluded from shaping solutions.

How Wasafiri works in practice

In practice, Wasafiri supports partners to design processes that bring diverse actors into shared learning and decision-making spaces, particularly those often excluded from formal strategy discussions.

This includes participatory research, systems mapping, community dialogue processes, co-design workshops and learning structures that connect lived experience directly to leadership and governance conversations.

Importantly, Wasafiri does not treat inclusion as a standalone activity. It is embedded into how we develop strategies and gather evidence, too.

Across our work in food systems, peacebuilding and climate, we help organisations spend more time listening to the people closest to the problem and finding practical ways to include them in decisions and action.

Why good ideas still fail

According to Aisha, one of the greatest risks organisations face is designing programmes that appear strong on paper but fail in practice because they are disconnected from how systems actually function.

When these realities are ignored, programmes can unintentionally deepen mistrust or create solutions that communities neither own nor care to sustain.

Aisha also notes that organisations frequently miss critical intelligence when lived experience is excluded from decision-making. People closest to the problem often understand emerging tensions, unintended consequences and windows of opportunity long before institutions do.

Ignoring these perspectives weakens adaptability over time.

What changes when people shape the decisions that affect them

Rather than designing solutions for communities, organisations could begin shaping solutions with them. According to Aisha, this shift creates more resilient partnerships over time. It also improves the quality of decision-making itself because strategies become rooted in a deeper understanding of how systems actually behave, rather than how institutions assume they should behave.

For Wasafiri, this is ultimately what strengthening inclusion for systems change is about: helping people work together, learn as they go, and keep adapting in ways that can create lasting change.

Work like this shows how bringing lived experience and power dynamics into the heart of decision-making can strengthen the effectiveness of complex initiatives. If you are working to ensure programmes are shaped by the realities of those they aim to serve, Wasafiri would love to be part of the conversation. Please reach out to Aisha Adan.

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Waiting for no one: the emerging era of development sovereignty

by Ian Randall/

Waiting for no one: the emerging era of development sovereignty

Ian Randall
Ian Randall

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Three conversations that changed how Ian Randall, and Wasafiri, think about the future of development in Africa

Last year, Overseas Development Assistance to Africa dropped faster than ever before, accelerating a long-term trend. This has triggered a period of creative destruction for anyone involved in African development.

The ODA era had us all oriented externally. What will drive progress now?

For organisations like Wasafiri, committed to making good change happen on the continent, how should we reorient ourselves?

I’ve been trying to listen for this emerging future. At every turn, I hear Africans claiming sovereignty over their development. Africa is waiting for no one.

Exhibit 1: A busy dump

Sam Mburu, in his twenties, is a pro boxer, long-distance runner, and founder of Dandora Green, a social enterprise that works with the waste-pickers at Dandora Dump – the largest waste dump in Kenya. At his invitation, I visited the site.

Five thousand people make their living sifting through Nairobi’s refuse to gather the plastics, metals, organic material, and paper for recycling. Dandora Green collates these pickings, negotiates contracts with buyers, and uses the proceeds to pay the waste-pickers, provide safety equipment, and ensure security.

New legislation is asking consumers to sort their waste at source, and requiring companies to pay for the cost of disposing of their products; generating public revenue that will pay a Ghanaian company to build a modern, efficient, safer sorting plant at Dandora dump.

While clearly progress, these measures will end the informal economy that provides for the waste-pickers. So, Sam is not waiting for anyone. He’s setting up a circular economy centre to retrain his community and create jobs from innovations that will upcycle the sorted waste into products like eco-bricks or t-shirts from recycled plastic.

These are exactly the kind of leaders Wasafiri wants to work with.

Rubbish dump
Sam Mburu pictured at the Dandora dumpsite in Nairobi

Exhibit 2: A birthday party

I joined our friends at the African Population and Health Research Center for their 25th Birthday Party. With hundreds of expert African researchers, they were joyfully celebrating everyone’s professional journey from research assistants to PhDs to cutting-edge studies that are unlocking a healthier future on the continent.

Wasafiri and APHRC colleagues discussed our next joint project, so I asked if partnering with a foreign institution might strengthen our pitch. But APHRC is waiting for no one.

We have partnered with APHRC on various fronts for years. They know the continent better than outsiders and can deliver high-quality research more affordably.

Exhibit 3: A wonky carrot

When Sylvia Kuria started her organic farm, she realised, “No one is coming to help me”. Her business would need to work on a purely commercial basis. Now she is Nairobi’s leading provider of organic food.

Through the African Food Fellowship, Sylvia connected with Wasafiri’s work embedding local farmers and traders in school feeding supply chains in Nairobi’s informal settlements and saw an opportunity. To scale, the meals would need to be affordable for families getting by on very low incomes.

Thankfully, Sylvia waits for no one. She and her fellow farmers have wonky carrots that they can’t sell elsewhere. Now these cut-price vegetables have a market, and Mukuru kwa Njenga’s pupils are studying on a full belly.

Sylvia and Ian at a recent Wasafiri Gathering
Sylvia and Ian at a recent Wasafiri Gathering

What this means for all of us

None of this is to minimise the damage. The collapse in ODA has real human costs, nowhere more painfully than for the people with HIV who depend on anti-retroviral drugs now caught in funding gaps.

But it also seems to have popped the collective delusion that positive change can come from agendas defined and resourced in Brussels, London and D.C.

In the emerging paradigm, Africans are claiming sovereignty over development. People once termed beneficiaries are now partners. Leadership is coming from those who inhabit the complexity of the issues and who will sustain change beyond funding cycles or fickle political agendas.

For Wasafiri, as a consultancy committed to Africa’s future, this new era is exciting. We are orienting ourselves to the leaders like Sam and Sylvia and institutions like APHRC, who are making good change happen.

The question is no longer whether Africa is ready. The question is whether the rest of us can keep up.

Let’s go!

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From pilots to systems change in climate-smart agriculture

by Hannah Metcalfe/

From pilots to systems change in climate-smart agriculture

Hannah Metcalfe

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Climate-smart practices and tech solutions are growing, yet scale remains limited. A regional analysis commissioned by the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands-Nairobi and Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO) explores why several of these rarely scale, and where the real challenge lies in the systems surrounding them.

Jointly authored by EKN/RVO and Wasafiri

Across East Africa, governments, development partners, and the private sector have invested significantly in climate-smart solutions; from drought-tolerant seed varieties and solar-powered irrigation to digital extension services and carbon finance pilots. Yet a familiar question persists: why, despite years of promising pilots and proven technologies, does meaningful scale remain so elusive?

Part of the challenge is that learning about what works rarely travels far enough. Successes are reported but often are not unpacked in ways that reveal why, where, or under what conditions they succeeded.

The answer, increasingly, is that climate-smart solutions are not a technology problem. It is a systems problem.

Transforming how millions of smallholder farmers manage land, water, and climate risk requires shifting the conditions that determine whether farmers can access tools, afford to adopt them, learn from each other, find profitable markets, and operate in a policy environment that rewards rather than penalises resilience.

To better understand how climate tech solutions are scaling across the region, the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO) and the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Nairobi (EKN) commissioned a regional scoping exercise across East Africa.

The aim was to look across their project portfolio and identify the ways these practices are showing up to address climate change impacts, enhance resilience, and boost adaptation, and to ask what could be scaled or replicated.

The analysis examined programmes across Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Tanzania, spanning climate finance, value chain resilience, smallholder service delivery, digital agriculture, and regenerative practices. Rather than evaluating individual projects, it looked at how climate interventions interact with the wider system, and what conditions enable promising approaches to spread beyond pilot scale.

The findings showed how four systemic factors repeatedly determine whether climate-smart practices stay small or genuinely scale.

ChatGPT image showing the relationships of different bodies overlaying an African farming scene

1. Finance is the gateway to adoption

The most consistent barrier to farmer adoption of climate-smart practices is not a lack of knowledge about what works. It is the inability to bear the upfront cost of change.

Whether the practice in question is improved water harvesting, climate-resilient seed varieties, biodigesters, or sustainable soil management, smallholder farmers routinely understand the long-term benefit. What they cannot always absorb is the short-term risk. The investment required before the returns materialise, in farming seasons where one poor decision can mean real hardship.

Where blended models combine grants, credit, insurance, and income linkages in ways that reduce the cost of first adoption, uptake follows. The programmes demonstrating the greatest traction are those that treat finance not as an afterthought, but as a fundamental design element of climate-smart delivery. Sustainable finance ranked as one of the six core dimensions in assessing how scalable any given approach truly is.

2. Farmer networks are the engine of learning

Climate change is, by definition, a moving target. What works this season may need adjustment next season. The practices that succeed in one agroecological zone may need re-designing in another.

Farmers who are connected to lead farmer networks, producer organisations, peer learning groups, or digitally mediated knowledge exchanges are consistently better positioned to adapt, refine, and pass on what they learn.

The most effective knowledge systems are not top-down. They are peer-driven, locally embedded, and structured to allow learning to flow both ways.

Programmes that invest in building these networks, not just as a delivery mechanism for extension, but as a genuine learning infrastructure, show measurably better outcomes in long-term adoption and resilience.

When farmers trust each other’s experience, they are more willing to try new approaches. And when those networks are connected to digital tools that capture and share what is working, the learning compounds.

3. Private sector active role is what sustains change

Development programmes can finance adoption. They cannot, by themselves, sustain it. The programmes showing the most durable results are those that have managed to align private sector incentives with climate-smart outcomes, where the commercial logic and the climate logic point in the same direction.

This alignment takes different forms. In some cases, it is agribusinesses or off-takers willing to pay a premium for produce that meets environmental or sustainability standards, giving farmers a direct market signal that climate-smart practices pay.

In others, it is input suppliers and service providers who see a commercial opportunity in serving smallholder farmers better, and who build business models that make sustainable inputs more accessible and affordable.

In others, it is blended financing arrangements that make it commercially viable for the private sector to operate in markets that would otherwise be too risky.

The common thread is that when private sector actors have a genuine commercial stake in climate-smart outcomes, the resulting change has staying power that grant-funded programmes alone cannot provide.

4. Government alignment is what enables scale

Even the most well-financed and commercially viable climate-smart initiatives will struggle to reach national scale without enabling policy. But in many East African countries, including Kenya, the policy gap is not what it once was.

Kenya has comprehensive, well-drafted frameworks for climate change mitigation, adaptation, and food security. What consistently falls short is implementation and enforcement: translating national commitments into the subnational structures, resourcing, and political will needed to create effective change.

Programmes operating in environments where governments are actively aligned with climate-smart goals, often through supportive regulation, public investment, and political commitment, achieve far greater reach than those that are not.

One biodigester initiative in Uganda illustrated this directly: a significant part of its success was the active partnership between the Ministry of Energy and the Ministry of Agriculture, whose coordinated support helped increase the adoption and availability of biodigesters in the country.

Embedding climate-smart practices within public systems, rather than running parallel to them, is consistently what gives programmes the durability to outlast any individual donor cycle.

Scaling is not what happens after a programme ends. It is what happens when a system has been changed enough that it continues to move in the right direction without external push.

Looking back

The volume and variety of climate-relevant work identified in this analysis are notable. EKN, RVO, and the Food, Nutrition, and Security teams are clearly doing serious work in this space, and perhaps the most telling indicator is how consistently climate approaches are showing up in programmes that were never explicitly designed to address it.

These are projects built around increasing productivity, market access, or value chain development that have, in practice, become vehicles for climate adaptation and resilience because the teams implementing them recognise that climate change is one of the most significant barriers standing between farmers and food security.

But the scale of what is needed means that no single development partner, however committed and however well-positioned, can drive this transition alone.

The regional analysis points to a clear conclusion: the next generation of climate-smart solution programmes must be designed with systems change in mind. That means treating finance, farmer networks, private sector incentives, and government alignment as interdependent levers that need to move together.

RVO and EKN’s commitment to understanding this landscape and to looking across the full portfolio of Dutch-funded programming and asking hard questions about what actually enables scale, reflects the kind of strategic, evidence-based leadership that the sector needs more of.

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Image generated using AI on ChatGPT.

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Meet the girl who wanted to build roads (and factories)

by Gacoki Kipruto/

Meet the girl who wanted to build roads (and factories)

Gacoki Kipruto

Gacoki Kipruto & Stella Odhiambo

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A glimpse into the mind and work of Gacoki Kipruto, Wasafiri’s new Partnerships Manager.

When Gacoki Kipruto was eight years old, she stood at her aunt’s home in Othaya, central Kenya. Plum trees were heavy with fruit, so abundant they couldn’t be eaten, sold, or given away. At the very same time, other parts of Kenya were facing hunger. In her mind, she could see the solution clearly. It was simple: take the food to where it was needed. Problem solved, right?

“Unfortunately, there are no roads,” she was told.

And that answer stayed with her.

It sparked two early ambitions for Gacoki: to one day build the roads that could connect food to people, and to start a plum jam factory so that nothing would go to waste. It was her first encounter with a broken system. And her first instinct was to fix it.

Today, as Partnerships Manager at Wasafiri and Kenya Country Lead at the African Food Fellowship (AFF), Gacoki is doing the work of connecting what exists but doesn’t yet work together.

Gacoki speaking at an AFF event
Gacoki speaking at an AFF event

Learning to see the whole system

Gacoki’s path into systems change wasn’t linear, but that was intentional. Trained in marketing, she quickly found herself drawn to shaping how ideas, services, and solutions reach the people who need them most.

Her early work with organisations like the Eastern African Farmers Federation introduced her to the mechanics of development, such as value chains, financial inclusion, and the quiet complexity of making markets work for those often left out.

Over time, her work spanned agriculture, renewable energy, governance, and inclusive finance. This cross-sector experience gave her the ability to see patterns across systems and identify where connections are missing. An ability she now relies on deeply.

“I’m able to look at a problem from different POVs at once,” she says. “Not just as an agriculture issue, or a nutrition issue, but where those things meet.”

That ability to see the whole while working within the parts is at the heart of her role today.

Bringing people together to move change

At Wasafiri, Gacoki operates at the intersection of relationships and results. She describes Wasafiri as a “first responder”, the one you call when a system isn’t working.

Her work is to bring the right people into the room, help them see the system more clearly, and support them to move forward together by creating the conditions for new discovery.

“I really enjoy facilitation,” she says enthusiastically. “Bringing people to the table and helping them develop their own thinking to discover what’s possible – I love that.”

It’s a style that runs counter to more direct approaches. Gacoki asks the questions that unlock clarity, then helps shape that clarity into action. This approach is amplified through her work with the African Food Fellowship, where she works closely with a diverse network of leaders across Kenya and Africa’s food system. There, she spots opportunities for collaboration, linking ideas, and creating the kind of synergy where “one plus one becomes five.”

What makes her particularly effective is her ability to move fluidly between worlds. She is as comfortable speaking with policymakers and donors as she is with farmers and grassroots organisations. It’s a skill, she says, that is built from curiosity, a trait she names as central to who she is.

“Sometimes you’re a connector. Sometimes you’re documenting what’s working. Sometimes you’re amplifying it,” she explains. “Each person plays their role, but in concert with others.”

What lies ahead?

Looking ahead, Gacoki is energised by the growing recognition that complex challenges cannot be solved in isolation. “There is a sense of urgency about how to respond to a rapidly changing world,” she says.

“I want Wasafiri to be the place people turn to when they need to make sense of complexity, and when they need to think through what to do next.”

It’s a vision that echoes the thinking of that eight-year-old girl, standing between abundance and need, asking a simple question: how do we connect the two?

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