On 17 and 18 February 2022, FoodLAND is celebrating its third Governing Council Meeting. Partners in the six African countries participating in FoodLAND have offered a deep review of the work that has been carried out so far. 

Nevertheless, the meeting started with a one minute silence for the two members of the consortium that have recently passed away: Noble Bannada, from Makerere University in Uganda, and Matthew Tenywa Mwanja, from NARO.

The main activities that have been performed in FoodLAND during its first 18 months have been devoted to consolidating knowledge about consumers’ and farmers’ needs and preferences, in order to adequate the innovations that are going to be developed and introduced to those needs. A big amount of interviews have been run both with consumers and farmers (crop and fish farmers). For example, 5.440 farmers participated in the interviews, between 400 and 500 farmers at each Food Hub. 

In these interviews, very diverse information was collected for further analysis, including the educational level of farmers, their participation in associations, what affects their activity, their willingness to adopt new technologies, etc. The gender perspective has also been taken into account, so data have been collected and analysed from this point of view. This analysis has revealed interesting results, which will be progressively published by research partners.

The morning session finished with the updated information about all Food Hubs, the innovation centres that have been created or selected for FoodLAND.