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.

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The FUEL project highlights the rapid transformation taking place in African secondary cities and its impact on food security, food systems, livelihoods, poverty, and governance. Defined broadly as cities with fewer than half a million inhabitants that are not a capital city, secondary cities are absorbing the majority of Africa’s urban growth but receive less infrastructure investment, policy focus, and academic attention than large primary cities. The lack of resources and policy attention to secondary cities is acute across sub-Saharan Africa, where highly centralized national governments in partnership with global actors control much of the policy agenda for geographically dispersed and culturally diverse populations, often leading to severe policy gaps in addressing the needs of residents in secondary cities.

FUEL builds on research findings of three allied projects: (1) the African Food Security Urban Network (AFSUN), which identified widespread food insecurity in southern African cities, (2) the Consuming Urban Poverty (CUP) project, which explored poverty, governance and urban planning through a food lens in secondary cities in Kenya, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, and (3) the Hungry Cities Partnership, which produced new insights into the linkages between urban food security and informal food systems in primary cities across the Global South. FUEL provides a unique contribution to this emerging field of scholarship by focusing on:

• Secondary African cities in all regions of sub-Saharan Africa
• The interaction of household food security with food system transformation
• City-wide surveys of household food security and informal food system actors
• Interdisciplinary approaches

FUEL is located at the intersection of three bodies of scholarship:

• “Southern” urban geographical theory that challenges Western biases by studying diverse human settlements in the Global South;
• Secondary urbanization in Africa, which has received insufficient empirical study and where there is untapped potential to develop policies at the local level to address residents’ daily needs; and
• secondary urban food systems in Africa, which are shaped by cultural, ecological, economic, and political factors across multiple scales and provide a focal point for imagining tangible pathways to ecologically sustainable and socially inclusive urban futures.

FUEL aims to produce research that facilitates policy innovations for sustainable food governance in secondary cities by generating new evidence and by working with local researchers, communities and policy-makers to develop progressive development strategies. The evidence and policy recommendations will influence a broad set of actors in global development, municipal and national governments, and interdisciplinary scholars in food studies, urban studies, development studies, and policy studies.