Promoting investment for sustainable food systems
Authors
Ensuring the sustainability and resilience of global food systems requires a fundamental shift in how finance and investment are directed. In 2024, ECDPM partnered with IFAD to create a series of events that focused on addressing critical barriers and fostering collaboration to channel more resources towards sustainable food systems.
As part of a new video series featuring ten ECDPM experts on our 2024 highlights, Cecilia D'Alessandro discusses our work with the UN's International Fund for Agriculture and Development (IFAD). Learn more about the events on our dedicated page.
The work had three main areas of focus:
Elevating the conversation on finance and investment: understanding why it is so hard to channel finance into sustainable agriculture and how to make the business case for specific, impactful value chains. This includes exploring innovative mechanisms to leverage more finance and de-risk investments to encourage private sector engagement.
Bringing together the different actors involved in food systems finance, including financial institutions, development agencies, UN agencies, and small-scale farmer organisations. Our aim is to avoid a plethora of small, isolated projects and instead promote partnerships for bigger impact.
Driving towards practical impact and scalable solutions: identifying synergies between different financial actors and exploring how successful stories and investments can be scaled up.
Looking ahead, we will continue to strengthen partnerships and apply our expertise on the food finance nexus to future projects. This includes working with organisations like the African Union Development Agency to integrate policies and create investment pipelines for more climate-resilient and food-sensitive corridors. Our goal is to connect different coalitions of financiers and facilitate learning and collaboration for greater collective impact. We believe that by better coordinating existing resources and scaling up investments, we can achieve more sustainable and resilient food systems globally.
For more information, get in touch with
