Happy Holidays! We hope you are enjoying this wonderful time of the year, thus far. As we near the end of 2017, we want to take a moment to thank all of our partners, investors and supporters for your interest in and involvement with the World Food Bank.
We have achieved a great deal this year with you by our side, and we look forward to many exciting new developments on the horizon for 2018, including our launch in East Africa, deeper integration with our strategic partners, collaborations with innovators and thought leaders to produce new solutions to key challenges in food security, and continuing to promote our systemic approach to alleviating world hunger through market-based improvements to the food system. Read on below for more on what’s on the horizon for WFB in 2018.
World Food Bank Launches in East Africa
Currently, the World Food Bank is working in countries across East Africa, including Uganda, Rwanda, and Kenya. As we work to converge best practices across the agricultural value chain in East Africa, our initial areas of focus will include the coordination of government agencies, non-governmental organizations, microfinance institutions, development banks, new technology solutions and private enterprises. The graphic below shows the 12 sections of the agricultural value chain that we are honing in on, with oversight of this value chain to be coordinated through comprehensive monitoring and evaluation software.
Integration with Strategic Partners
The World Food Bank will work with leading NGOs to coordinate solutions that fill the gaps identified in the value chain in a manner that assures the integrity of the entire value chain. Stay tuned for more announcements on our NGO partnerships to come.
Global Surveys
WFB will be beginning a series of focused surveys in 2018 to be shared primarily via our newsletter and our social media channels with the goal of aggregating thoughts, ideas, and solutions for key challenges in emerging market agriculture and food security. Â We will be seeking participation from the agricultural industry, banking and finance, and private enterprise to give feedback that can feed into our efforts for improving efficiency. Stay tuned for more to come on this front, and feel free to reach out to us at any time with early thoughts on individuals or entities that might be interested in collaborations in these areas.Â
Promoting Systemic Approach
WFB intends to begin buying grains and pulses in Uganda in 2018 in support of small and medium sized farmers. To ensure sufficient growth in the supply of soya, we have contracted for the production of more than 1,000 acres of high-quality hybrid seed, and we are working to promote the import of proven organic fertilizers and pesticides to help manage the challenges of aflatoxin and army worm, which is presently attendant in maize and soya. We have also arranged for the use of up to four regional facilities for storage of the crops. WFB teams will be working in Rwanda, Kenya, and Ethiopia to evaluate the integrity of the agricultural chain and the capacity-building needed to get agricultural growth on the trajectory desired.Â