Gender gaps in assets, livelihood strategies, and control over income clearly impose costs on households, communities and nations. Explicit attention to gender is thus key to achieving the Malabo goals of shared prosperity and improved livelihoods through inclusive agricultural growth. This is one of the key findings from the 2019 Annual Trends and Outlook Report, prepared by ReSAKKS. The report looks at gender equality in Africa’s rural areas. Read on

Official Development Assistance for urban development is mostly channelled to big cities, benefitting some 63 million people or37% of the region’s total urban population of 171 million people. About 45% of urban development projects were implemented in agglomerations with more than 300 000 inhabitants. However, nearly half of West Africa’s urban dwellers live in small and medium-size cities. Considering West Africa’s rapidly growing small and mid-sized cities, development partners need to better target and scale up their support. Read on

The theme of the African Green Revolution Forum (AGRF 2019), which brought together some 2 400 key stakeholders on 3-6 September in Accra, focused on using digital information and tools to support sustainable food systems in Africa. With the facilitation of USAID, the SWAC Secretariat presented the Africapolis database and key findings from its work on urbanisation. Read on

The food economy has particularly strong potential to accelerate job creation, and should therefore attract greater policy attention. In order to unleash this potential, the food sector needs appropriate strategies, investments and policies. “This involves endorsing three key principles: 1) Moving beyond agriculture and rural areas; 2) Taking spatial factors into account; and 3) Dealing with informality, aiming for inclusiveness,” explain Léopold Ghins and Koffi Zougbédé from the Sahel and West Africa Club Secretariat (SWAC/OECD) in an article published on the OECD Development Matters blog. Read on