✅ Brief statement by Henriette Hanf at the start of the 2023 SNRD Africa conference « Transform & Innovate: Future-proof Food Systems », which was held in Somone/Senegal, 8-13 October.

Henriette is in GIZ’s Sectoral Department at the Portal for Internal Clients working on green topics including rural development.

Transcript

[Music] I have a lot of expectations for this conference. One is of course to meet colleagues because I work in Eschborn born in the headquarters to get a better grip on what’s going on in the in the projects on the ground. What are the colleagues doing? What Solutions do we already have? Which innovations maybe to get some steps further on our way to transforming Agriculture and Food Systems.

So I’m really excited to learn what’s going on actually on the ground. What I’m really interested in currently? I’m working with a broad range of topics. Rather a bit on the surface. But what I’m interested in also from what I’ve been working before on is actually how to bring forward also – let’s say – political solutions in agricultural policies that are evidence-based which somehow takes steps in the right direction regarding the transformation of Agriculture and Food Systems – as we were discussing yesterday for example in one of the working groups: how to handle – let’s say – input subsidies for fertilizer. What impact does that have on the transformation of agriculture and food systems, on the environment – to become a bit more concrete: how could instruments look like? How could policies look like which foster the evidence-based way of transformation in terms of serving people, serving the environment and achieving these objectives – that is something I’m really especially interested in seeing. What do we have? Because it’s not only a question of evidence-based policies but of course also a question of political economy and that is a very interesting topic I think [Music] yeah