Oktober 2024

Continuing Updates: Progress and Next Steps for “From Lab to Mouth”

As part of the ongoing work under the “From Lab to Mouth” project, significant progress has been made in identifying the barriers, opportunities, and next steps to enhance household adoption of food system innovations in Africa. The latest updates include reflections on obstacles, insights from previous meetings, and plans for upcoming consortium discussions and workshops.

Enhancing Focus: Key Opportunities and Barriers

Building on the foundational assumption of this research, several barriers that affect household adoption of food innovations have been identified. These include:

• Regulatory Barriers: Innovations must navigate complex regulatory frameworks to become accessible.
• Institutional Gaps: Weak collaboration among stakeholders can delay investment and widespread adoption.
• Affordability: New innovations often come with high upfront costs, requiring mechanisms like subsidies or financial support to make them accessible to households.
• Skill Gaps: Complementary investments in education and soft skills, such as literacy, numeracy, and management abilities, are essential to empower households to adopt innovations successfully.
• Unintended Consequences: Innovations may have unforeseen effects, such as environmental degradation (e.g., solar irrigation accelerating groundwater depletion).

These challenges underscore the complexity of transforming food systems and highlight the importance of further research, particularly on the role of households as agents of change.

Insights from Recent Discussions

1. Innovation as a Dynamic Process

Recent meetings emphasized that innovation is not static. Households must be empowered to adapt innovations to their unique contexts. Drawing on evolutionary innovation theory, this project views household adoption as an improvisational process, where users can tinker, adapt, or reconfigure innovations to align with their needs and circumstances.

Household-level experimentation could allow for creative adaptations, enhancing the sustainability and relevance of innovations. For example, a household might modify guidelines for food preservation methods to fit their local climatic conditions, demonstrating agency in co-creating solutions.

2. Building on Previous Research

The research will integrate findings from prior studies, such as Melanie Rechnitzer’s work on school gardens in Benin. Her study underscored the need to explore household-level innovation and agency in food system transformation. In this project, insights from Melanie’s findings will guide the co-design of household-level experiments to tap into their innovation potential.

3. Focusing on Climate Change Adaptation

To ensure feasibility, the project will narrow its scope to household innovations related to climate change adaptation, either directly or indirectly. This targeted focus avoids overextending by trying to integrate all innovations from the 10 living labs, making the research more manageable and impactful.

Upcoming Consortium Meeting in Kenya

The next significant step is the consortium meeting in Nairobi, where stakeholders from the 10 Living Labs under the Healthy Food Africa (HFA) initiative will come together. The meeting will use Natalia Rodriguez’s framework, adapted for this research, to guide discussions and refine the upcoming grant proposal.

Natalia Rodriguez’s Framework

Originally developed to investigate AgriFoodTech startups in Chile, this framework integrates the concepts of:

• External Enablers (EE): Factors like market conditions, government policies, and natural resources that influence innovation adoption.
• Internal Enablers (IE): Organizational capacities, such as skills, networks, and financial resources, that drive innovation.

Key Discussion Questions for Kenya

The meeting will address the following questions to deepen understanding of the innovations:

• What makes these innovations unique?
• Who are the intended beneficiaries of these innovations?
• What challenges (social, technical, economic, organizational, or political) could hinder the scaling or adoption of these innovations?
• What strategies can be employed to overcome these challenges?
• How might these innovations impact the biophysical environment?
• What unintended consequences could arise from the innovations?
• Are there sustainability plans to ensure the innovations endure beyond the HFA project?

The answers will help identify household capacity-building priorities and refine the main research question for the signature grant application.

Next Steps: Building a Stronger Proposal

Co-Creative Brainstorming Workshop

Following the Kenya meeting, a two- to three-day writing and brainstorming workshop. During this workshop, stakeholders will refine the incubator grant idea and develop sections of the proposal.

Collaborating with HFA Stakeholders

Coordination with HFA program leaders is essential to align this project’s goals with the broader HFA agenda. By synchronizing efforts, this project can leverage existing data and avoid duplicating questions already being addressed in the HFA program.

Emerging Themes and Long-Term Vision

This project continues to evolve as a dynamic investigation into how household capacities can drive food system transformation. By focusing on the household level, the research bridges the gap between innovation design and real-world adoption, ensuring that food system transformations are sustainable, inclusive, and contextually relevant.

The insights gained from Kenya and the workshop will set the stage for a compelling grant application, advancing our understanding of how living labs can catalyze transformative change in food systems across Africa.