Book Launch: My Food is African: Volume 2

26 May 2026. Webinar Book Launch: My Food is African: Volume 2

• This powerful new guide goes beyond what we eat. It looks at the systems shaping African food choices, including culture, policy, markets, corporate power, advertising, gender dynamics, and citizen action.

AFSA, Barefoot (2026).  My Food is African: Volume 2 — How Citizens Are Reclaiming African Food Systems.  158 p.

Through live story readings, reflections, dialogue, and audience participation, the launch brought the guide to life as a tool for organising, advocacy, public education, and movement-building across Africa.

Published in 2026 with support from SIDA under the Transforming African Food Systems to Sustainability (TAFS) Project, this Barefoot Guide is a landmark publication — collective in authorship, continental in scope, and uncompromising in its argument.

Written by over 35 individuals — farmers, journalists, researchers, market traders, chefs, activists, and civil society advocates from across 50 African countries — Volume 2 picks up where Volume 1 left off. While the first guide helped individuals and families understand how to eat more healthily, emphasising traditional foods, dishes, and diets, this second volume asks the harder, structural questions: Who controls what Africans eat? Who benefits? And what happens when ordinary people decide to change that?

What the Book Takes On

Across seven chapters, the guide maps the real forces shaping African food — and the real people fighting back.

1. The ultra-processed food crisis. Ultra-processed foods are flooding African communities, driving rising rates of diabetes, high blood pressure, and obesity, backed by corporate marketing budgets that dwarf anything civil society can match. The book examines this crisis honestly — including the difficult conversations with policymakers who are not villains but are, as one Ugandan permanent secretary put it, “trapped in a system they didn’t create.”
2. From practice to policy. In Nigeria, sustained advocacy brought corporate seed legislation under public scrutiny. In Senegal, an agroecological farmers’ network secured land for organic farming through local government engagement. In Kenya, Zambia, DR Congo, Cameroon, and Zimbabwe, the book follows an AFSA team across ten countries documenting where the campaign is producing real, measurable change — in schools, parliaments, markets, and kitchens.
3. From consumers to food citizens. In the DRC, twenty trained journalists produced hundreds of radio programmes reaching an estimated two million people, challenging corporate food narratives and reshaping media coverage. In Zambia, community radio turned ten free weekly slots into farmer networks and peer learning groups. In Cameroon, the Je Mange Camerounais movement made traditional food culturally trendy through restaurants, social media, and celebration.
4. African markets are our markets. From Mbare in Harare to Thiaroye in Dakar to Jedaida in Tunisia, the book makes a powerful case for Africa’s territorial markets — the informal, community-rooted spaces that feed the majority of African people — as the backbone of food sovereignty, not problems to be modernised away. These markets maintain food diversity, sustain women’s economic power, and underpin agroecological food systems. They deserve protection and investment, not criminalisation.
5. Advocacy in global spaces. The guide examines how African civil society is building capacity to engage the African Union, COP climate conferences, and the UN Committee on World Food Security — on African terms.
6. A Vision for 2045 — and Beyond. The book closes with a grounded, honest imagining of what African food systems could look like by 2045, structured around eleven pillars of food sovereignty in practice. It celebrates real victories and names real defeats. Its conclusion is neither triumphant nor defeated: “The question now isn’t whether food sovereignty is possible. We’ve demonstrated it is. The question is how fast we can scale.”

My Food is African: Volume 2 is available in English and French (Je Mange Africain: Volume 2). It is a guide for organising, advocacy, public education, and movement-building — for citizens, researchers, policymakers, educators, journalists, chefs, and everyone committed to African food sovereignty.

“When we say My Food is African, we’re reclaiming power over our bodies, our communities, and our future. This is about who we choose to be as a continent.”

📥 Download the guide:
My Food is African: Volume 2 — How Citizens Are Reclaiming African Food Systems