Dr. Anne Siebert

The impact of the pandemic has created immense challenges in implementing Sustainable Development Goal 4, which strives to ensure quality education for all. Based on the finding in the policy brief, Africa presents the highest numbers in terms of education exclusion, with more than a fifth of the children aged between 6 - 11 years not in school, according to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS). Education exclusion is also gendered, with girls being more likely not to attend and drop out of school, resulting in high illiteracy rates. Urgent action is therefore needed, especially in providing Internet access and connectivity, ICT tools and virtual learning opportunities, particularly in the face of an ever-growing youth population in Africa. Responding to this challenge, the African Union’s Continental Education Strategy for Africa (2016-2025) highlights the need to strengthen the linkages between tertiary education and the world of work using appropriate technology. It is also important to revitalize and expand higher education to contribute to a well-equipped African workforce and globally competitive society. The ideas in this policy brief have been informed by the authors' ongoing research and experience and as a contribution to the Knowledge Network of the Office of the Special Adviser on Africa (OSAA). The OSAA Knowledge Network creates a platform for the Office to engage with academics, experts and think tanks through a win-win partnership and seeks to bring visibility to the work of the experts in the global arena. Products from the Knowledge Network, such as this policy brief, will enhance the Office's advocacy on African priorities, as articulated in the African Union’s Agenda 2063 and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

In urban South Africa, food initiatives seem to promise diverse benefits including food security, income opportunities, and community solidarity. Many of these groups view the dominant industrialised agri-food system critically. Still, they often operate in niches and struggle to create truly revolutionary alternatives. This chapter was inspired by a community-led urban agriculture initiative in Cape Town. Most of the members are not fully integrated into the labour market and benefit from the solidarity in their community. They share knowledge, seeds, and the literal fruits of their labour. The case illuminates the interplay between hope, as a way of proposing alternatives, and the constant companion of trouble enshrined in the country’s agri-food system and highly unequal society. This contribution engages with the following guiding question: How can alternative food providers truly create hope through resisting the system in place and confront related troubles? It applies a critical reparative approach that is inspired by Eric Olin Wright’s varieties of anti-capitalism. The aim is to analyse diverse strategies for challenging the dominant food system and related inequalities. Whereas different interventions imply various weaknesses, Wright’s considerations help to sketch out new perspectives and to broaden the horizon beyond isolated manoeuvres.

This paper illuminates how urban food producers contribute to the construction of food sovereignty in less-expected urban settings in the Global South. In South Africa, jobless de-agrarianisation, apartheid legacy, and rapid food price inflation are shaping the realities of marginalised urban inhabitants. Urban food movements have been critically observing these developments and have begun to raise their voices against social inequality. In this way, they offer a fertile ground to put food sovereignty into practice. While food sovereignty has become a globalised vision, it has been adapted in specific contexts to address issues ranging from the struggle against corporate power to self-determination in the agri-food system. Drawing on research conducted on an urban agriculture movement in George, Western Cape, this contribution provides a sketch of the way people propose alternative visions about the organisation of food and land grounded in everyday life.

Production from smallholder farmers makes an important contribution to global food security and represents the starting point for sustainable rural development. But how do smallholder farmers view current global trends in farming and food? How do they experience the impact on their living environments? We offer three different points of view from Ghana, Malawi and South Africa.

Based on a constitutionally guaranteed human right to water, Uganda has implemented far-reaching reforms in the water and sanitation sector over the past decade – with limited success so far. The Working Paper analyzes and critically evaluates this rights-based water reform process on a global and national level in order to identify the context- specific conditions for the successes and failures. It investigates not only the political framework conditions in Uganda but also the formal and informal sectors of society. In particular, the paper asks whether and how human rights-based arrangements and strategies can serve as a role model for addressing urgent challenges in the water sector. Furthermore, the paper discusses how policy transfer, rights awareness, and community participation in context of water supply and sanitation might be influenced in a sustainable way.

In many cities around the world, individuals, community groups, and non-governmental organisations play an increasing role in creating productive urban spaces. Agriculture shapes the urban habitat and therefore contributes to the transformation of the city. Guided by Lefebvre’s approach of the ‘Right to the City’ and the concept of ‘Food Sovereignty’, this contribution focuses on the activism of inhabitants – the way they produce and manage urban space – and their motivations. The theoretical approach is illustrated with a case study of a community initiative, which is active in urban farming in disadvantaged neighbourhoods in George, South Africa. The initiative is concerned with healthy nutrition, organic food production, urban greening, waste management, and empowerment of the community. By highlighting the importance of bottom-up approaches in the urban food system, the authors discuss how these community efforts can be sustained and integrated on institutional level.

Dieser Artikel befasst sich mit dem mehrdeutigen Phänomen der Ernährungskrise und legt dabei einen Schwerpunkt auf dessen Ausprägungen, und Herausforderungen sowie dessen zeitliche und regionale Verortung. Das Zusammenspiel dieser Dimensionen und deren Unterkategorien verdeutlicht die Schwierigkeit, ausschließlich von einer Ernährungskrise zu sprechen. Vielmehr müssen feinere Deinitionslinien gezogen werden, um die Komplexität dieser Problematik nachvollziehen zu können. So wird beispielsweise eine Ernährungskrise oft mit Hunger verbunden – neue Entwicklungen, wie die steigender Fettleibigkeitsraten, werden dabei jedoch ot vernachlässigt. Darüber hinaus sollte die Ernährungskrise nicht als ein alleiniges Problem der Entwicklungsländer erachtet werden. Dieser Beitrag betont ein facettenreiches und kritisches Verständnis des Sammelbegriffes Ernährungskrise und dazugehöriger Aspekte. Die Autoren schlagen eine lokale Perspektive als Teil der Lösung des Problems vor. Ein Fallbeispiel einer südafrikanischen Gemeindeinitiative, die in urbaner Landwirtschat aktiv ist, veranschaulicht mögliche Wege, um Konsequenzen der Ernährungskrise auf lokaler Ebene zu überwinden, und stellt Aspekte einer neuen Nachhaltigkeit vor.