Making the provision of nutritious and affordable food a business: Two case studies of the intertwined processes of frugal innovation and inclusive development in Ethiopia and Benin.
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This #GoFrugal Seminar Session we have invited Sietze Vellema as our guest speaker. Sietze Vellema is associate professor at the Knowledge, Technology and Innovation group, Wageningen University, and senior researcher at the Partnerships Resource Centre (PrC), Rotterdam School of Management, the Netherlands. Sietze’s interest is to understand why and how different actors collaborate in solving organisational, managerial, and technical problems related to inclusive development and sustainable food provision. At PrC, he leads action research with the 2SCALE program focusing on agri-food chains, partnerships, poverty, and food security in Africa. During this seminar, he presents a draft paper co-authored with Greetje Schouten and Peter Knorringa.
Food, frugality and inclusive development
Policy debates on food security have adopted a strong focus on the production and availability of food, which is complemented by a growing interest in access to nutritious food by low-income consumers. This seminar focuses on affordability, which relates food provision to the growing interest into frugal innovation. Following Leliveld and Knorringa (2018), the research explores whether product development and food provision by two business entities in Ethiopia and Benin may offer novel development opportunities and alter the conditions for inclusivity (full working paper). Accordingly, the discussion connects the development of frugal food products to an interest in inclusive development, in particular the terms of access to affordable food products and the terms of inclusion of the suppliers of the raw materials, specifically smallholder farmers.
This research contributes to an empirical perspective of frugal practices in food provision by shifting focus to the hidden middle of agri-food chains: the sites of intermediary trading where wholesalers and traders buy and sell food and organise produce and cash flows for this purpose. It analyses two case studies of agri-businesses that manage both the terms of inclusion and the terms of access and consequently create conditions for addressing food insecurity by enabling affordable food provision. The case studies of specific innovation and business practices provide insight into major challenges for companies providing nutritious food products to the poorest and most vulnerable.
The discussion shifts attention from an exclusive focus on novel food products to the practices connecting terms of inclusion and terms of access in food provision. Such practices manage both produce and financial flows underlying trading. Trading sites represent an evolving set of cunning and improvisational practices of aggregating, sorting, grading, cleaning and distributing food in resource constrained and often unpredictable conditions. The analysis scrutinises development interventions targeting the elimination of these frugal practices situated in the hidden. The discussion searches for development pathways that reconfigure the terms of inclusion and the terms of access in food trade and therefore capture the transformative potential embedded in frugal practices in the hidden middle.
Are you interested in joining this #GoFrugal Seminar Session?
Register now for this session on the 31st of May