FCI4Africa | Supporting Fair Food Systems & Trade in Africa

FCI4Africa – Fair Food and Trade Systems for Africa through Food Convergence Innovation is a four-year research and innovation project working to make African food and trade systems fairer, more inclusive, sustainable, climate-neutral and health-promoting. 

• The project runs from 1 November 2024 to 31 October 2028 and has a total budget of €4.50 million (€4,499,353). 
• It is funded by the European Union under Horizon Europe, within the programme area Food, Bioeconomy, Natural Resources, Agriculture and Environment (Grant Agreement No. 101182485). 
• The project is coordinated by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) and brings together 13 participating organisations from Africa, Europe and Canada. FCI4Africa project on CORDIS

FCI4Africa responds to a central challenge for African agriculture: increasing agricultural production alone is insufficient if farmers, SMEs and food businesses cannot access markets on fair terms. The project therefore combines food-system innovation with intra-African trade development, working on challenges such as market access, non-tariff measures, food safety, product quality, value-chain business models and access to knowledge and technologies. Among its planned outputs are a Digital Knowledge Hub, an open innovation and demonstration platform, analytical methods for different food product–trait combinations, and innovative solutions that can be tested and subsequently adopted by food-system actors.

An important feature is that FCI4Africa does not restrict innovation funding to the original consortium. 

• It has allocated €600,000 for Financial Support to Third Parties through two Open Calls, supporting at least 12 additional projects. 
• The first call provides €400,000 for eight projects of up to €50,000 each, targeting universities, research institutes, technology developers, SMEs, start-ups and other multidisciplinary actors. 
• These projects will test and validate technologies, tools and business concepts addressing trade, non-tariff barriers and market access and will run from November 2026 to October 2027. 
• A second €200,000 call will support four projects involving innovation hubs, mentoring and acceleration, with implementation foreseen from October 2027 to June 2028. 
• FCI4Africa Open Calls