From dialogues to action: commitments by African governments to transform their food systems and assure sustainable healthy diets

Abstract

The 2021 United Nations Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) and associated dialogues brought together diverse food system actors and stakeholders from across the globe to take action on transforming food systems. These actions included pledges and expression of commitments from both state and nonstate actors to transform their food systems. State actor commitments are visions of what governments expect of their food systems by 2030, and their aspirations to achieve those expectations. This paper reviews pledges made by African Heads of State at the 2021 UNFSS and examines how responsive those commitments are to three dimensions of sustainable healthy diets, namely, nutrition and health, socio-economic, and environmental. Second, the paper assesses how responsive the commitments are to the World Health Organization’s “priority food systems policy actions” that include nutrition labeling, marketing regulation, public food procurement, fiscal policies, food fortification, reformulation, and food safety. We operationally define responsiveness as alignment or relatedness of the commitments to the dimensions of sustainable healthy diets, or the priority policies. We contextualize our appraisals using available literature on the subject.