Urban food markets in Africa: Incentivizing food safety using a pull-push approach

In collaboration with national and international partners, the ILRI-led Pull-Push project aims to improve food safety in urban informal markets in Burkina Faso and Ethiopia. While previous efforts have focused on training producers or regulators with little attention to incentives for behaviour change, the project investigates if consumer demand can provide the same incentive ('pull') for food safety in low- and middle-income countries as it has in high-income countries. It also builds capacity of market-level value chain actors to respond to demand and of regulators to provide an enabling environment ('push'). It is hypothesized that both 'pull' and 'push' approaches need to be co-implemented in urban food markets in Africa to lead to sustainably improved food safety, in addition to an enabling environment. 

WUR focuses on the impact assessment of interventions implemented in this program to explore and evaluate whether empowering consumers to buy safer food, can drive improvements in the safety of these foods on sale, resulting from improvements at the retail level in the value chain as well as vendors’ response to meet consumer preferences for safe food, specifically tomatoes for home consumption in Ethiopia, and chicken meat for out-of- home consumption in Burkina Faso. 

The project is supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) of the UK government, and the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health