Foro Global sobre Seguridad Alimentaria y Nutrición (Foro FSN)

Thursday, 9 July 2020 @14:00 - 15:30 (UTC+2)

The Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak continues to spread throughout the Near East and North Africa (NENA) - Arab States region. The pandemic will have huge impacts on public health and represents already an unprecedented shock to economies, food systems and labour markets globally and in the NENA region, affecting rural poverty and resilience. It is estimated that an additional 8.3 million people in the region could fall into poverty. 

Given this broader impact, the consequences of COVID-19 pandemic require responses that go far beyond the health sector; including measures to assist people and protect them against falling into poverty due to the socio-economic impacts of the pandemic, highlighting the crucial importance of inclusive, comprehensive and stable social protection systems. Systems that respond to differentiated needs across population and income groups, are flexible to be scaled up quickly in times of crisis and contribute to the resilience of food systems. 

FAO highlights the importance of using innovation and digital applications in social protection as a way to ensure that people can maintain their livelihoods and sustain themselves in times of emergencies and beyond, especially in rural areas. This webinar will set the stage by looking at some of the promising digital and innovative solutions in social protection in order to limit the negative impacts of this crisis on rural poverty, resilience and food systems, including on food security and nutrition.

The webiminar will address the following questions:

• How the NENA region has been affected by the crisis? (Socio-economic impacts)
• What social protection initiatives have been implemented to support rural areas that can be scaled up and replicated? (Selected success country-cases from NENA, and other examples)
• How can governments and partners foster innovation and digital technology applications in social protection to build the basis for a more comprehensive and inclusive social protection system in the long-term?  

Opening remarks:

• Abdessalam Ould Ahmed, Assistant Director General and Regional Representative for the Near East and North Africa – FAO
• Rabah Arezki, Chief Economist for NENA Region – World Bank 

Speakers:

• Fabio Veras, Communications, Publication and Research Coordinator – IPC-IG, Overview of the social protection response to COVID-19 around the world and in the region for FSN. 
• Samman Thapa, Regional Social Policy Advisor for the MENA region – UNICEF, Overview of the child-sensitive social protection response to COVID-19 around the world and in the region. 
• Rodrigo Assumpçã, Social protection Management Information Systems specialist – ILO, Overview of the horizontal expansion of social protection to the informal and rural economy in Egypt or Tunisia.
• Chakib Abouzaid, Secretary General – General Arab Insurance Federation, Overview of the role of agriculture insurance as a response to COVID-19 in the region.
• Salma Zaky, Social Protection Officer & Marta Dabbas, Regional Digital Assistance Services Officer – WFP, Overview of digital technology applications in social protection in response to COVID-19 in the region. 
• Omar Benammour, Social Protection Officer – FAO ESP, Overview of FAO’s work on social protection in the region and the response to COVID-19: Example of Kenya, Tunisia, Sudan and Morocco.

Facilitated by: Omar Benammour, Social protection Officer – FAO

HOW TO ATTEND

Only registered participants will attend, please find the Registration Link here

Please note that the session will start on time on 09 July 2020 at 14:00 – 15:30 (UTC +2)

We invite all participants to kindly login 10 minutes before.

For more information please visit www.fao.org/neareast/events/view/en/c/1296227

For further inquiries please feel free to contact: [email protected] 

SALSA - Small Farms, Small Food Businesses and Sustainable Food Security, is an EU-funded research project of the Horizon2020 program which run from April 2016 to March 2020 with the aim to provide a better understanding of the role of small farms and small food businesses in meeting the sustainable food and nutrition security challenge.

In the project, FAO was responsible for the communication and joint learning, setting up Communities of Practice at various levels as multi-stakeholder learning platforms to consult, validate and move forward the research and enrich the knowledge base on relevant questions.

SALSA pioneered a novel integrated multi-method approach in 30 regions across 19 countries in Europe and Africa using the most recent satellite technologies, field assessments, systematic review, participatory construction of knowledge, transdisciplinary theory building, and participatory foresight analysis.

One of the project's major outcomes is a series of 5 Policy Briefs with policy lessons and recommendations that especially target decision makers in the reference regions as well as the EU policy development, paying particular attention to the Europe-Africa dialogue.

The SALSA project experience demonstrates that agricultural and food systems research across continents, with research sites in both Europe and Africa, can result in valuable insights and learning in both directions. Lessons from Europe are valuable to African partners, as their countries are developing rapidly. An understanding of strengths and weaknesses of European agricultural policies (and their impacts on small farms) can improve decision making. European partners can learn from Africa about informal and community-based approaches to support food and nutrition security.

The SALSA research shows that policy interventions would benefit from being more territorially based and from taking into account the characteristics of regional food systems and as well as the different types of small farms that take part in them.

Small farms in Africa are estimated to undertake more than 70% of the agricultural activities on the continent, thereby helping ensure food, employment and rural livelihoods. Available data however indicate that there remain severe challenges related to food insecurity and nutrition. Producing enough food in Africa in an environmentally and socially sustainable manner will therefore require sustainable increases in productivity for all farm types. Two overriding policy recommendations of relevance to all regions studied:

• Introduce appropriate combinations of policy interventions to help small farms add value to their produce since they are more productive and profitable when they specialize in quality produce and processing. This may include support to those small farms that are mainly self-provisioning, but who have the ambition to commercialise.
• Foster and facilitate cooperation as the most enabling and empowering form of governance for small farms and small food businesses. This includes the introduction of appropriate frameworks for value chain strategies /contracts that promote greater coordination and the more equitable distribution of power and financial benefit between small farmers and other supply chain actors.

The Policy Briefs

• Overview
• Lessons from Africa
• Eastern Europe
• Northern Europe
• Southern Europe

Tuesday, 24 March - 14:00 - 15:30 CET

Even though there is a large consensus that it is an individual condition, poverty is usually measured using household aggregated data. At the same time, social policies in developing countries, including food security and nutrition interventions, often try to reach deprived individuals by targeting poor households. However, differently from what standard poverty measures assume, there is often substantial inequality in the distribution of resources within households. The consequence is that poverty reduction policies might be fail to identify the households where most deprived individuals live and/orreach those deprived individuals 

within their households.

In this webinar, Caitlin Brown will address the issue of intra-household inequality in the context of poverty measurement. She will discuss the challenges of identifying intra-household inequality as well as the consequences that accounting for it might have on current poverty numbers. Her presentation will provide an overview of the existing empirical evidence on intra-household inequality in nutritional outcomes, caloric intake, resource shares as well as discrimination against certain household members.  Finally, it will analyse the implications for targeting rural poverty reduction policies.

Agenda:

• Introduction by Erdgin Mane, Policy Officer, FAO
• Presentation by Caitlin Brown, Assistant Professor, Central European University
• Open Discussion

To take part register here

To join the Think-PA, please send an e-mail to: [email protected].

Organized by the Technical Network on Poverty Analysis (Think-PA)