Safer street and informally vended foods

Partners:
Food Research Institute, Ghana
National Institute for Scientific and Industrial Research, Zambia
City Health Department, Harare, Zimbabwe,
Jadavpur University, Bengal, India.

Problem:
The urban population in Africa and Asia is estimated to be 654 million.  In the majority of these target countries, informal food vending activities occur to differing extents, employing up to 20% of the working population (mainly female), generating revenue of $100 million in a typical city and providing low cost nutrition to urban populations.  However, these food security opportunities are threatened because of:

• food safety concerns that pose risks to health, in particular the young, elderly and those with HIV/AIDS;
• demands on a fragile urban infrastructure;
• lack of recognition by authorities and policy makers who often clear vendors from the streets. 

Achievements:
To address the above issues, the project developed a multi-stakeholder innovative platform that was comprised of large regional partnerships using a knowledge management approach.  Partners included policy makers, municipal authorities, standards organisations, consumer and vendor associations and researchers in Africa and Asia.  These partnerships developed an innovative ‘modular system’ for the systematic management and control of informal food vending that was brought about by bringing together knowledge and experiences from partners in Ghana, Zambia, Zimbabwe and India.  This approach has achieved the following benefits to vendors, consumers and its partners:

• Innovative approaches that changed the attitudes of Food Inspectors towards vendors from enforcement to supportive so that vendors obtained sustainable support;
• Trained over 5,000 vendors based upon training approaches developed by the project and an innovative training of the trainer programmes.  These were based on the results of food safety surveys (over 400 samples) and comprehensive socio-economic studies;
• Formed partnerships and linkages between vendor’s organisations from different regions so that they could share experiences; 
• Vendors reported increased turnover of between 10% and 15% and employed more staff;
• Consumer surveys (over 800 consumers) indicated that consumers did not always associated poor hygiene will ill health;
• Successfully transferred the innovative platform based on the modular system from Africa to Kolkata, India with support from coalition partners in Africa and the UK;
• Developed promotion programmes through innovative radio programmes (Eating out Safely), billboards and TV that potentially reached up to 350 million people globally (BBC) and 1 million nationally in Zambia (Eating out Safely).