Other Projects

Women Feeding Cities Project: Gender-Transformative, Resilient, and Sustainable Covid-19 Recovery of the Informal Food Sector in Secondary Cities

This project funded by IDRC will ‘scale-down’ our NFRF-funded Women Feeding Cities Project by focusing on these gaps in secondary cities of less than 500,000 in partner countries. Using a gender-responsive lens, we will investigate the multiple ways in which the Covid-19 crisis has disrupted the livelihoods of women in the informal food economy and the challenges and prospects for sustainable pandemic recovery in four secondary cities in partner countries: Xai Xai (Mozambique), Montego Bay (Jamaica), Oshakati (Namibia), and Cholula (Mexico).

Women Feeding Cities Project: Building a Gender-Transformative, Resilient, and Sustainable Informal Food Sector for COVID-19 Recovery

This Hungry Cities Partnership (HCP) comparative international project is funded by NFRF. It will examine the food security impacts of COVID-19 on micro-enterprises owned by women in the informal urban food sector, their households and communities in four HCP cities: Maputo, Windhoek, Kingston (Jamaica) and Mexico City. It has four main objectives: (a) compare the impact of the pandemic and public health policies on women in the informal food sector in Africa and LAC; (b) examine the responses and strategies of female-owned enterprises to the COVID pandemic and pandemic recovery challenges; (c) analyze the impact of pandemic disruptions on the food security of female-owned enterprises, their employees, their households and their customers; and (d) mobilize knowledge for the support and sustainability of women’s enterprises in the informal food sector going forward.

Assessing and Mitigating the Food Insecurity Consequences of COVID-19 Public Health Measures on Marginalized Refugees and Migrants in Canada, Latin America and Africa

Strategies to mitigate the public health impacts of COVID-19 have led to a secondary pandemic of global food insecurity. Our project will ‘scale up’ our First Round CIHR Grant on the negative impacts of COVID-19 on household food security in Wuhan and Nanjing, China to three additional cities: Quito (Ecuador), Cape Town (South Africa) and Kitchener-Waterloo (K-W) (Canada). This CIHR-funded project will have a particular focus on the food insecurity experience of marginalized immigrant and refugee populations during the pandemic and how to build greater resilience post-pandemic. We will undertake a comparative study of the food security and related health impacts of COVID-19 on immigrants and refugees who have settled in these three cities and who come from countries experiencing political and economic crises or natural disasters: in Quito, migrants from Venezuela and Haiti; in Cape Town, migrants from the DRC, Somalia and Zimbabwe; and in K-W, refugees from Afghanistan, Somali and Syria.

The project will be implemented collaboratively by a team of Canadian, South African and Ecuadorian researchers and has the following objectives: (1) to examine the impact of public health containment and mitigation responses to COVID-19 on the food security of marginalized refugee and immigrant groups in urban areas; (2) to assess the similarities and differences between the three sites in terms of access to government, business, and community food security and social protection mechanisms; (3) to provide critical decision-making and pandemic response data to local stakeholders to inform food policy responses; and (4) to strengthen the capacity of Canadian and LMIC researchers and research institutions to respond rapidly to ongoing and future food security shocks.

Food Security and Migrant Workers in Qatar

The project is part of the Migration and Food Insecurity in Cities of the Global South project (MiFood Project), which offers the opportunity to expand the network to additional countries including Qatar in the Hungry Cities Partnership that has currently partners in eight countries: Canada, China, India, Jamaica, Kenya, Mexico, Mozambique and South Africa.

Assessing and Mitigating the Food Security Consequences of COVID-19 in China

The proposed research will identify the immediate and longer-term impact of COVID-19 on household food security in Chinese cities, and will assess and improve fast-evolving social and policy countermeasures to enhance food security. Our research objectives are to: 1) Investigate the immediate food security challenges resulting from China’s quarantine measures, unstable food supply, and fear of shopping in two COVID-19 affected cities (Wuhan and Nanjing); 2) Assess how COVID-19 has impacted food security in Nanjing by longitudinal comparison with the baseline survey data collected through Hungry Cities in 2015; and 3) Synthesize and assess policies established and community response in addressing food security challenges and promote effective measures by engaging local stakeholders.

African Food Security Urban Network (AFSUN)

AFSUN was founded in 2008 with funding from the Canadian Government’s University Partners in Cooperation and Development (UPCD) Tier One Program to conduct research, capacity-building and policy work on the relationship between rapid urbanization and food security in 9 countries and 11 cities in Southern Africa. The research themes and outputs are all available on the AFSUN website.

Food, Urbanization, Environment and Livelihoods (FUEL)

AFSUN and the HCP have received a grant from the SSHRC Insight Grant program for a program of research, training and policy advocacy on food security in secondary cities in Malawi, Namibia and Cameroon.

Southern African Migration Programme (SAMP)

SAMP was founded in 1997 as a network of organizations in Southern Africa committed to advancing a regional migration and development agenda through research, training and advocacy.  SAMP is an internationally-recognized leader in migration and development research in Africa and has been funded at various times by CIDA, UK-DFID, IDRC and the Open Society Foundation.  SAMP is based at the IMRC at the Balsillie School and the University of Western Cape.

QES-AS Program: Governing Urban Food Systems in the Global South

The Hungry Cities Partnership has received a four-year (2017-2021) grant from the Canadian Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Scholarships advanced scholars program to fund the exchange of doctoral, post-doctoral and early career scholars between Canada and partner cities.

IPaSS: Informality, Inclusive Growth and Food Security in Cities of the Global South

This foundation project of the Hungry Cities Partnership is funded by the SSHRC and IDRC under the International Partnerships for Sustainable Societies Program (IPaSS). The project has facilitated the formation of an initial seven-city research and policy network across the Global South linked to researchers at five Canadian universities. The project has embarked on a five-year program of collaborative research on a variety of themes related to inclusive growth and the formal and informal urban food system in the study cities.

Consuming Urban Poverty (CUP) Project: Governing Food Systems to Alleviate Poverty in Secondary Cities in Africa

The CUP project is funded by the UK DFID-ESRC Urban Poverty Programme and focuses on the relationship between urban poverty and secondary urbanization in Kenya, Zambia and Zimbabwe Africa as viewed through a food lens. The project is based at the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town, also a partner in the Hungry Cities Partnership.

Growing Informal Cities Project

GIC is funded by IDRC and is a partnership between SAMP, the African Centre for Cities (UCT), Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo and the Gauteng City Region Observatory (GCRO). The project recently completed a three year program of research on migrant entrepreneurship and informal cross-border trade (including in the food sector) in four African cities.

South African Supermarkets and Food Security in African Cities

This project is being implemented by AFSUN, HCP and the University of Namibia in the HCP-affiliated city of Windhoek, Namibia. The pilot  funded by Open Society Foundation South Africa is examining the implications of the supermarket revolution for poor urban communities in the informal settlements of Windhoek.

Nourishing Spaces

The African Centre for Cities, the HCP partner in South Africa, has launched a new IDRC-funded project which investigates urban food systems in the prevention of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in South Africa, Kenya and Namibia.

Refugee Economic Impacts in South African Cities

This UNHCR-funded project examined the urban survival strategies of informal sector refugee and South African-owned enterprises in Cape Town and Limpopo.

Migrants in Countries in Crisis (MICIC)

This EU-funded project, implemented in partnership with the University of Western Cape, University of Limpopo, the International Migration Institute at Oxford University and the IMPCD in 2017-17, examined the plight of Zimbabwean migrants working in the South African informal sector.