Creating and Maintaining a Dialogue on Food Systems Change: iZindaba Zokudla at the University of Johannesburg: An essay for Fork to Farm and Nourish Scotland.
iZindaba Zokudla, which refers to the place where we have a conversation about the food we eat, has been hosting a multi-stakeholder dialogue on food system change since 2013. This research project at the University of Johannesburg is poised for further development in 2021, as the School of Management at the University of Johannesburg will adopt it as a flagship engagement programme. In 2021 the project will be partnering with various organisations in South Africa to develop new, smallholder and commercial farmers as sustainable entrepreneurs. iZindaba Zokudla will do this in three ways:
It will deliver a range of short courses, student service-learning and PG research projects to farmers and stakeholders that will build their capacity and ability to develop sustainable enterprises.
It will engage with larger stakeholders to prepare market-access opportunities for these sustainable farming enterprises. In this regard linkages to fresh produce markets, digital logistics systems, and adult education programmes will be organized that will create viable opportunities for farmers to trade profitably and sustainably.
It will continue to organize open access public dialogue opportunities through which we can enable public access to these activities. This will enable anyone to participate in the thematic programmes being created, allow diverse public scrutiny in these projects, and allow a wider constituency of people to participate in activities that aim at a sustainable food system.
The above will be implemented by iZindaba Zokudla hosting the following:
· The iZindaba Zokudla assembly. This event will be hosted as soon as COVID regulations allow mass open access organizing. iZindaba Zokudla attracts up to 400 people to its events and this was done from 2015 until 2020. This affords a grand and open opportunity for the public and all entrepreneurs to engage with stakeholders who have an interest in the success of their enterprises. This allows mass public education, outreach, specialist information and technology transfer to take place at low cost. This event will in future be streamed and digitized, so information retrieval is possible, and this has already been done to some extent on the Facebook page. This will enable public co-creation of thematic projects that can realise a sustainable food system.
· The iZindaba Zokudla Virtual Lab. This lab will transform to an entrepreneu -led facility and discussion forum where emerging entrepreneurs can form Communities of Practice around their enterprises. This will enable emergent entrepreneurs to organize their own networks or Communities of Practice around what they do, and we are aiming this to give important support and guidance to these entrepreneurs.
· Specialist services from the UJ: The University of Johannesburg can create pertinent courses and interventions in the food system that will enable emergent entrepreneurs to become more successful. In this regard iZindaba Zokudla is able to engage with donors on the development of specialist capacity building programmes for emergent entrepreneurs. This could take various forms, from formal enrolment in courses to Short Learning Programmes and Work Integrated Learning assignments for commerce students. This will give emergent entrepreneurs collegial and formal support in establishing and developing their enterprises.
· Post-Graduate research projects can be tailor made to assist emergent entrepreneurs in their own enterprise development. The development of action-research projects is possible at the UJ that will give emergent entrepreneurs the opportunity to contract highly specialized skills at very low cost to develop their enterprises.
The above will create a larger ecosystem wherein emergent entrepreneurs will be able to develop their enterprises. This will also draw on the larger UJ system and entrepreneurs would be able to benefit from a wide range of support.
To arrive at this system of food systems change took many years of struggle and failure, and I had to re-invent iZindaba Zokudla several times in the past. Next year, it may still look very different.
However, this blog would like to clarify how iZindaba Zokudla emerged. This will place the above in context and give us a glimpse of how actors may behave in this very complex task of food systems change.
iZindaba Zokudla emerged after a few years of engagement with NGOs who promoted the idea of “systems thinking” about the food system. TransForum and the SA Food Lab organized these and I met key actors on the ground in Soweto in one of these dialogues. This birthed the idea to start a public dialogue – perhaps a food policy council – to engage with farmers and others in the Soweto Township in South Africa.
However, this idea crossed another opportunity. At this time, I was teaching research methodology to the Faculty of Art Design and Architecture and this focused very much on Action Research. Angus Campbell enrolled for a PhD in Development Studies with me and we developed a project to develop technology together with Soweto Farmers. His PhD was also completed early this year, and it focused on technology innovation amongst farmers in Soweto.
We decided to “embed” the participatory technology design project in a “broad forum”, and I hosted three important workshops with urban farmers and NGOs in 2013. This created a strategic plan for the development of urban agriculture in Soweto, but presented this simply as a set of themes that needed to be addressed to get urban agriculture “going” in Soweto. These included:
1. Land and Water (Soil);
2. Relevant Stakeholders (Authorities, Extension Officers);
3. Training (Youth, Skills, Information);
4. Tools (Greenhouse, Tractor, Technology, Infrastructure);
5. Marketing (Transport, Business development, Agro-processing);
6. Organizational Development (Cooperatives, Labor);
7. Permaculture (Pests, Seeds, Composting); and,
8. Security (Theft, Fencing).
The above gives a key qualitative glimpse on what farmers need to get ahead in Soweto.
However, I was consumed in 2014 with the technology design project that led to three provisional patents. I still believe this was perhaps one of the most rapid patentable participatory tech design processes ever, and one design, Natalia Tofas’ “Food Cooler” that worked with evaporative cooling, was particularly interesting. It would have been too expensive to manufacture this, but the designs are freely available. This was her 4th year or Honours Thesis at the Dept of Industrial Design at the UJ.
During this time, I was consistently and thoroughly accosted by farmers to establish a “Farmers School” in Soweto. Eventually I did so and re-created the “broad forum” of 2013 as the “Farmers’ School and Innovation Lab”. I bootstrapped these and before each event I would take a whole day to phone the 80+ phone numbers I had at that time to invite people to these events. Now I can use mass sms and WhatsApp for these invitations. In the beginning I also did not have an agricultural “expert” available. This pushed me into the right direction. I started using local experts for lectures, and all of a sudden the “Lab” became alive. They would often use local languages and I later would “off-set” university experts with local experts. This pushed me into the space of “adult education and understanding of science” and I relished the opportunity. One of the last Labs before COVID struck included researchers from the Universities of Johannesburg, Nairobi, Liege and Gent. This was one of the first public dialogues on Mycotioxins in the Food Chain ever in South Africa.
iZindaba Zokudla had a golden age between 2015 and 2020 when we could freely organize mass engagement opportunities. I can mention Tim Abaa, Linda Manyeza, Mapheu Pule, Tookie Sekgobela, Nelisiwe Mkhabela and many others who started businesses at this time. We also saw the birth of the Send-Me chicken group. iZindaba Zokudla hosted innumerable businesses during this time, and the Facebook page will have a full record of all of this. We also started referring businesses to our Process, Energy, Environment and Technology Station and the Centre for Entrepreneurship in the Johannesburg Business School. This is continuing and shows the benefits of organising entrepreneurship development in an event.
The move to the digital domain during COVID saw the birth of the Virtual Lab and the idea that we can organize groups of farmers as “Communities of Practice” to build their entrepreneurship. This idea connects strongly with others who advocate for “autocatalytic networks” or “symbiotic communities” that will be the stuff over which we lay sustainable living, enterprises, landscapes, processes, governance structures, and activism to achieve sustainability,.
This idea also gives us a reason to engage in conversation with others for sustainability. This must be more than an indulgence and flirtation with intercultural communication to have any effects. We need to know why we are doing this kind of thing.
Please allow me to conclude on this point by drawing on my experience in hosting this very spectacular but open ended project.
In South Africa we need to build a market (almost from scratch) in the Townships of apartheid. This affirmative and social justice driven activity has to however build businesses and exchanges in order to create the material wealth we need to transform South Africa and address poverty, inequality and unemployment sustainably. To do this, I offer some insights:
We need to build the requisite density of relationships in a community for this community to trade at all. When people do not know each other they distrust each other. To build this social capital we need a means to enable people to meet and see the commonalities amongst them.
To overcome mistrust, relationships have to be deep. This is also necessary for complex trade of any magnitude. Densities of relationships can be built also with information, and this could let people know why some are doing things in their peculiar ways – why is a credit record important? – but it also allows us to modify relationships and allow us to accommodate each other easier. This is necessary particularly for complex things like new technology adoption or engagement in research projects.
Information is key. Often emergent entrepreneurs simply do not understand value chains, or technologies. The truth sets people free. Truth also allows people to self-select what is appropriate for them, and this is important. In the food system, emergent entrepreneurs are liable to be fooled or manipulated by spectacular “deals” and we see this often with chicken farming. Farmers are given a one size fits all universal system to farm chickens that more often than not leads to farmer impoverishment. It is better to struggle and develop such systems yourself. Chicken farm “developers” often give – for free – feeders and drinking trays. These are often too big and chickens foul the water and food quickly by standing in these trays. I often thing they are deliberately designed so emergent farmers spend additional amounts on feed.... This leads to sicknesses and many other troubles.
A observant farmer will simply elevate the drinking and feeding troughs to stop chickens from standing in them and fouling them. For a newcomer to the business this is the difference between success and failure. We often “develop” farmers in such a way that we eliminate the opportunity there is for entrepreneurial learning.
Entrepreneurs need to be nested in deep and broad relationships for them to be able to experiment and tweak their enterprises in order to be profitable. The construction of firstly an assembly allows people to form their own networks that can give a conducive context for experimentation and modifications to the enterprise. An assembly can also re-create personae’s that would better reflect the attitudes and behaviour needed for an entrepreneur to succeed. Secondly, a public innovation lab can affect larger groups of people to change behaviour so that it accommodates economic activity better. In this way we can not only tinker with customer behaviour (we often advocate for urban farmers to start their own retail “store” on the farm that sells at convenient times and allows the farmer to focus on production) but we can also enable farmers to optimize product and enterprise development to serve customers.
A public innovation lab can also secure commitments from larger stakeholders to engage and assist emergent entrepreneurs. Businesses are always looking for new deals, and an able entrepreneur is lucrative as they will want to improve the competitiveness of their own supply chains. If we get this commitment in a lab, in public, we can also extract commitments to move the system towards sustainability. This allows us to draw on cues in the larger context, and in this way we can operationalise something as abstract as a “Sustainable Development Goal” as a means to promote a struggling emergent entrepreneur. This will lead to the creation of a circular enterprise. We need a robust system that can identify and promote these long chains of activity. In this long chain, we need to connect the entreprenru with activists, with larger investors, and with customers. This is how a sustainable value chain will look like: The farmer creates a circular enterprise that harvests wastes for fertiliser in the community. These are processed by worms before being double digged into the ground in a deep trench garden. Community members want this as activists have impressed on them the importance of sustainable and healthy eating. The farmer creates an adult education facility at his farm and invites the community to sample his fresh foods. People realise they can buy healthy food locally and start supporting the farmer. His waste harvesting leads to savings in municipal waste management and lower prices for fresh food in the local area. The community exhibits greater health in the years to come.
A public innovation lab re-creates the social contract. This is one of our supreme regulative ideas that shapes our societies. Engaging with the public affords us an opportunity to innovate in how we have constructed society amongst ourselves. Because we are facing such decisive and wicked challenges, we need a means as powerful as this to achieve sustainability. We can operationalize the ecosystem and biodiversity in a public innovation lab as we can use the time to show who productive biological and organic methods of production are. It is in the re-education and re-invention of society that the answers to sustainable development lie. We are able to engage in such a grand way, but this time we will do it for our own local food systems, and this will make the social contract something we can all understand, live and breathe, as the contract will shape how we construct the places where we live.
#PhamiliBalimi – go forward the farmers!
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