Food and Nutrition Security is a central objective of the Sustainable Development Goals and the Post-2015 agenda. In this framework UNCDF aims to enhance food security and nutrition in the Least Developed Countries through a renewed programmatic approach to finance local development, which includes the development of the Global Finance for Food called F4F. The F4F is conceived to provide solutions for localized food and nutritional insecurity through an increase in public, public-private and community investments through decentralized government structures, systems and processes.  

F4F is based on 3 phase life cycle and currently implemented in Mozambique, Burundi and Mali with LDF as a main financing mechanism of local food security investments. Knowledge generation, sharing and management are one of the most important asset for UNCDF for having implementing food security projects for couple of decades. 

The Workshop has been held in the context of the agreement with IFAD with a double objective i) to improve Food Security projects implementation and lessons capturing and ii) share experiences of countries and build their capacity on Knowledge Management (transformation, generation, use and dissemination) and Strategic Communications to feed the KM platform in IFAD large grant context.

In order to achieve the objective of the workshop, working sessions were carried out. After sharing of the countries’ experiences and lessons learnt, the technical discussions revolved fundamentally around how UNCDF Finance 4 Food approach could enhance its implementation and outreach in the existing pilot countries and how lessons learnt and best practices generated so far could help to implement a food and nutrition security knowledge management strategy. 

Coming up from the working discussions it was highlighted the imperative need to reinforce local governments capacities and fiscal space to finance food security and nutrition interventions. It also came out from the discussions that currently most of the knowledge is based on the local development fund (LDF) as main financing mechanism used by local government counterparts to finance food security development interventions. However, special attention is being given to maximize synergies with UNCDF Local Finance Initiative to increase private (and public) investments for strengthening food security systems for local development. 

In this context, Finance 4 Food implementation modalities, tailor made methodological guidelines per country and the establishment of a knowledge generation and knowledge management strategy and platform were thoroughly discussed among the participants in the working sessions.

Many recommendations on how to achieve the knowledge management target have been agreed, among which following the preparation of the knowledge management products on LDF and private project finance related to food security investments financing, developing methodology to identify food security investible investments for private and PPP financing and website/platform development in compliance with IFAD agreement.
The lessons learnt coming up from Brussels working sessions highlighted local government ownership, development partners’ harmonization to enhance coordination for more knowledge sharing to improve efficiency of designing, implementing, monitoring and evaluation of Food Security and Nutrition projects.