Cities Farming for the Future

Project Information:

The RUAF-Cities Farming for the Future (CFF) programme seeks to contribute to urban poverty reduction, urban food security and improved urban environmental management including safe reuse of urban organic wastes and wastewater. It also seeks to contribute to the empowerment of urban farmers and participatory city governance by developing the capacity of local stakeholders and facilitating multi-stakeholder policy formulation and action planning (MPAP) on urban agriculture (UA).

The project, which is being coordinated by IWMI-Ghana for the Anglophone West Africa region, is part of a global drive by RUAF Foundation, (www.ruaf.org) an international network of Resource Centres on urban agriculture and Food Security on .policy support, action planning, training and information exchange on urban agriculture through multi-stakeholder processes. The project will contribute to the stated development goals through the following strategic components implemented in an integrated manner:

• Consolidation of regional resource centre on UA: This component seeks to strengthen the regional resource centre to provide useful information and advisory services and training assistance to municipalities, NGO’s and other national and local stakeholders in UA in the region. {download the poster}

• Capacity development: This aims at enhancing the capacities of stakeholders both institutions and individuals in UA through the provision of various training activities and further assistance to capacity development needs identified by stakeholders.{download the poster}

• Knowledge management: This seeks to capture and document all the experiences gained from the various activities in this project. These experiences are further shared at different levels within the project areas through specific knowledge sharing platform and activities such as workshops, individual meetings, conferences and other information outlets like newsletters, magazines, brochures, CD ROMs, etc. {download the poster}

• Facilitating participatory policy formulation and action planning: This seeks to ensure the continuity and sustainability of processes of multi-stakeholder policy formulation and action planning including participatory design and implementation of pilot projects. This would be realized through the formation of MPAP teams on UA in the pilot cities (Accra, Ibadan and Freetown).{download the poster}

• Gender mainstreaming: This aims at achieving the integration of gender into all the project activities. {download the poster}

• Promoting Learning through Monitoring: This aims at promoting learning through the use of participatory monitoring tools in the design and implementation of project activities.{download the poster}

Project Duration:

The RUAF-CFF project is from 2005 – 2008. The next phase of the project, which is “From Seed to Table” FSTT), will be from 2009 to 2010.

Geographical Focus:

The implementation of the RUAF-CFF II project in the Anglophone West Africa region currently covers six focus cities. Three of these focus cities, namely Accra (Ghana), Freetown (Sierra Leone) and Ibadan (Nigeria) are Pilot cities where multi-stakeholder platforms are established while the remaining three, namely Akure (Nigeria), Cape Coast (Ghana) and Tamale (Ghana) referred to as Dissemination cities benefit from capacity building activities and implementation of pilot projects on UA