The COVID-19 Response and Resilience Initiative for Food Value Chains in Africa (CORE-Africa) project was set up to support 8 major agriculture projects (BRIDGE, CRAFT, HortInvest, Horti-LIFE, TIDE, MODHEM, PADANE and STAMP+) respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. It aimed to capture lessons for interventions and policies more broadly to build resilience.

Launched in July 2020 and concluded in December 2022, CORE-Africa worked intensively with selected knowledge partners - WUR, the Springfield Centre, Bristol University, the D4Ag coalition under NFP – to backstop field level projects and distill lessons. These partnerships helped to sharpen strategies, methods, and practices moving forward. We also sought to use the pandemic as an opportunity to accelerate learning across individual projects on vital challenges in food VC/system development.

Learning and exchange

Learning and exchange were at the heart of the CORE project and key to its objective to support projects to improve their response to the pandemic. To avoid duplicate processes, CORE drove a pragmatic learning agenda based on topics, methods, learning and discussions. While some learning was overarching, much of it was specific to the components. We supported the development of knowledge as well as interactive sharing within SNV and beyond. Our knowledge partnerships were a key element of CORE's learning approach. They provided essential external knowledge, made us learn together with reputed players, and allowed us to join forces in sharing lessons in external fora.