PROJECT SUMMARY  

PROJECT DESCRIPTION  

Unprecedented urban growth is placing enormous burdens on governments across Africa. Demand for infrastructure, services, and basic needs such as housing, water, sanitation, and food security is growing and state agencies are struggling to meet this growing demand. Although this trend towards urbanization is driven by various flows, migration from rural to urban regions is the dominant contributor to the burgeoning population growth being experienced by African cities (Awumbila, 2017). Rural outmigration is driven by a decreasing ability to maintain a satisfactory and sustainable livelihood in rural areas of the continent. Researchers have coined the decision, making dynamic drawing rural residents to urban zones, despite the squalid conditions and poor job opportunities, as a “push” factor (Tacoli, 2003). Simply put, rural communities find it increasingly difficult to survive. Although a complex issue driven by factors such as a rapidly evolving global economy and an increasingly erratic climate, nutrient mining plays a major role in this phenomenon. African farmers, hindered by a lack of financial capital, are unable to apply fertilizers at the rates necessary to produce sufficient and competitive yields, forcing them to search for economic opportunity elsewhere. As a consequence, informal settlements, unplanned urban zones and peri-urban areas on land under traditional governance, which are marked by unclear property rights, are growing rapidly (UN, 2015). These underserved communities have limited access to potable water or municipal sanitation services, and suffer from chronic food insecurity. The lack of appropriate sanitation, combined with high population densities, creates an environment suited to the outbreak of waterborne diseases such as cholera and dysentery (World Health Organization, 2019). Furthermore, rates of food insecurity in these settlements are amongst the worst on the continent (Crush, 2012). Together these development challenges make the urban poor amongst the most vulnerable populations in the world. Thus, efforts that seek to improve livelihoods across the rural-urban nexus are critical to socially equitable and ecologically sustainable development in Africa. RUNRES will seek to address these issues by identifying, testing, and installing, through a transdisciplinary and multi-stakeholder development process, innovations (related to waste-recycling and small-scale processing) that can improve the resilience and sustainability of regional food systems in four different city region food systems across Africa: Arba Minch, Ethiopia, Kigali, Rwanda, Bukavu, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Msunduzi, South Africa. The initial portion of Phase 1 (2019-2022) of RUNRES will focus on the establishment of a vibrant and inclusive transdisciplinary innovation platform (tdIPs) in each of the city region food systems. This will entail the identification and inclusion of key stakeholders, the identification and testing of selected innovations, and the acquisition of a comprehensive baseline understanding of the biophysical and socio-economic circumstances for each city region food system. We expect this initial planning, stakeholder organization, and city region food system analysis will comprise the first year of RUNRES. The immediate outcomes developed in the first year will then inform efforts dedicated to the attainment of the following intermediate project outcomes (Y2, Y3 and Y4): 
 

• The installation of ecologically sound, socially acceptable and hygienically safe innovative sanitation solutions that can improve public health, reduce environmental pollution and provide high quality agricultural inputs. 
• Increased access and use of locally sourced soil amendments that will improve sustainable local agriculture. 

• Improved postharvest processes to increase production efficiencies. 
• Involvement of private actors across all sections of selected food value chains, with emphasis on empowerment, participation, 

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