Strengthening capacities for enabling policy environment to support family farmers in Africa

FAO and RUFORUM collaborating in the context of the United Nations Decade of Family Farming (UNDFF) 2019 – 2028

18/05/2022 – The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is collaborating with the Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture (RUFORUM) to strengthen the capacities of state and non-state actors to develop and implement public policies for family farming in Africa.

Family farmers rely on family labour for production and other farm operations and produce almost 80% of the world’s food in value terms. In Africa, they dominate the agriculture sector providing livelihoods for over 70% of the population, and are central to a sustainable future for agriculture, eradicating hunger and poverty, achieving social cohesion, employment, and sustainable use of natural resources. However, many of them are poor, food insecure, and live below the national poverty line.

Supporting family farming in Africa through, among others, creating an enabling policy environment, is critical to ensuring adequate resource allocation, effective and inclusive governance and institutional arrangements, and placing permanent solutions toward more resilient and sustainable agrifood systems.

FAO and RUFORUM are collaborating to organize capacity development activities aimed to create an enabling policy environment to support family farmers in Africa through the delivery of training programs based on the “learning framework for inclusive, integrated and innovative public policy cycles for family farming,” the first global product developed by FAO and IFAD to support the implementation of UNDFF 2019 – 2028. Read more here