Consortium Europe Africa on Research and Innovation for Food Systems Transformation (CEA-FIRST)

CEA-FIRST will operationalise an International Research Consortium (IRC) as a long-term platform on food and nutrition security and sustainable agriculture (FNSSA) in line with the FNSSA roadmap of the AU-EU High-Level Policy Dialogue (HLPD).

The IRC is a member-based, multi-actor platform and will work towards increasing synergies and coherence while reducing fragmentation and duplication of research efforts. Its aim is to promote higher returns on investments and impact on business development in Africa and Europe, by linking actors, research and innovation projects, initiatives, and funding programmes.

CEA-FIRST will:

1. provide public access to a large knowledge platform,
2. offer a sound method for analysis of R&I activities,
3. support the updating of the FNSSA Roadmap,
4. establish operational working groups and thematic research calls.

The final output will be a fully functional IRC, including governance bodies. CEA-FIRST will also support its liaison with the High-Level Policy Dialogue (HLPD). It will create a learning environment, including communication channels, to support multi stakeholder networks and to strengthen R&I coordination. The IRC will also serve related AU-EU policy priorities, such as the Climate Change and Sustainable Energy and the Innovation Agenda of the HLPD, as well as the European Green Deal priorities (and farm to fork strategy) and the AU priorities like the African Free Trade Area.

The CEA-FIRST project, the Consortium Europe Africa on Research and Innovation for Food Systems Transformation, kickstarted in Tema, Ghana, 12-14 February 2024. All 21 partners where present to officially launch the CEA-First project and to have the first official International Research Concortia (IRC) signatories’ meeting.

CEA-FIRST is partly a continuation from an earlier project, LEAP4FNSSA, extended with new both public and private network partners. During LEAP4FNSSA, SLU mainly worked with setting up a database to map and cluster ongoing and recently finished EU-AU projects contributing to the FNSSA Roadmap. In CEA-First this work continues and expands to setting up a one entry point knowledge platform which will include a more user-friendly database and will form a basis of the knowledge platform for the IRC. SLU is work package leader of two of the six packages of the project and involves staff from SLU Global and SLU University Library.