Amanda Namayi

It is a bright, sunny morning in Kenya’s coastal town of Mombasa, and my father has prepared perfectly sliced fruits fresh from the farm. This is the vision that comes to mind when I think of food security. However, that is not the reality for many a household in my home country. As fate would have it, the little girl enjoying the fruits of her father’s labour, both literally and figuratively, ended up becoming a Zero Hunger advocate herself.

With an estimated 48% of Kenya’s land being arable and agriculture contributing up to 33% of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), it is an acute paradox that approximately 5.4 million Kenyans, comprising ten percent of the total population, grapple with food insecurity. In my professional journey, I have had the privilege of experiencing different sides of the divide; from the farmers’ perspective to that of the development partner and from a Government agency perspective.

Years of visiting rural farmlands in sub-Saharan Africa and participating in global zero hunger advocacy panels helped me understand how development policies affect societies. Working with international NGOs focused on sustainable food systems for smallholder farmers ignited my curiosity about how effective policies can bring real change to Africa’s food systems.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I was part of the Youth in Soil pan-African team that researched on the impact of COVID-19 on Africa’s food systems and contributed to the Covid Food Future initiative under SEWOHLab. Part of my research work highlighted the unintended consequences of well-meaning policies and underscored the importance of designing comprehensive and context-specific interventions. This experience exposed me to the practical aspects of development policies, reinforcing my desire to contribute to this field from a different lens in addition to advocacy. I saw clearly that naming a problem and fixing it require entirely different skills, and that pulled me toward the space between economic development and public policy. I became more intentional with exploring the nexus between economic development and public policy within the context of food systems.

As one of the founding members of the Youth Alliance for Zero Hunger, I had the privilege of participating in some of the policy making processes at the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) in Rome, Italy and was part of the five-member, global youth team that convened the first, youth led and youth themed plenary session at the 46th Session of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS46).

My articles on how public policy was affecting food distribution in Kenya led to an invitation to be a panel speaker in The City Food Symposium 2020 special event on Harnessing the Power of Youth to Transform Food Systems for Health and Sustainability; and in the build up to the occasion, I was also invited to make a video contribution to the series of short talks by young food system leaders from around the world. I was honoured. Serendipitously, the term “food policy” was first introduced to me that same year by the then Director of the Centre for Food Policy, Professor Corinna Hawkes. Upon mentioning the course, I knew instantly that Food Policy was exactly what I was looking for. At the time, I was juggling multiple initiatives that did not allow me the time to pursue anything additional; but I maintained my eyes on the prize, and that was to pursue my Masters in Food Policy from City, University of London.

Looking ahead, I wanted to focus on influencing decisions that determine whether climate smart agriculture practices get adopted by the farmer and not dressed as another conference agenda, on the policies that decide whether food waste actually gets reduced not packaged as talking points in panel discussions, on the kind of resilience that gets built with smallholder farmers and marginalized communities rather than performative metrics for a donor report.

Most ecosystem players speak fluently about hunger while changing very little about who holds power over the harvest. Case in point, this is the International Year of the Woman Farmer, yet, as the food systems sector commemorates a theme, the underlying laws remain inconsequential. Between 85% – 91% of women in Sub-Saharan Africa do not own the land they cultivate on, and their names seldom feature on the title deeds, reflecting deeply rooted socio-economic inequalities that many women in agriculture face.

The questions I ask myself, about who gets heard and who gets studied instead, deserve better than another round of advocacy that flatters everyone in the food systems sphere except the actual people going hungry. I want to be in rooms where land rights, credit access, inheritance and other policies get rewritten, not to mark an occasion, but to ensure the outcome goes beyond a hashtag.

Amanda Namayi