CREATING REGIONAL KNOWLEDGE ECOSYSTEMS TO ENSURE FOOD SECURITY

Introduction

Southern Africa lags behind in innovative agricultural research thereby leading to exacerbated food insecurity in the region. The increasing food insecurity within the region is a call to member states to scale up innovative approaches to strengthen the resilience of the population to disasters affecting the agricultural sector. It is against this backdrop that there is a need to explore ways to create knowledge hubs that can be used to ensure food security. 

The demand on research institutions

There is a growing demand for universities to take up the role of communicating knowledge to wider audiences. Information on agricultural transformation and innovation is poorly disseminated making it difficult to accept without thorough knowledge of how the innovations work. This has been the greatest undoing in the agricultural sector, witnessed by some countries out rightly rejecting new information. 

Knowledge production in sub-Saharan Africa has stumbled through decades of systematic marginalisation and devaluation (Obamba, 2012). Southern Africa is lagging far behind in terms of public expenditure on research and development consequently affecting food security. On average, the region spends a paltry amount of its GDP on agricultural research. This limits innovative research which can help ensure that the region is food secure.

The shift in agricultural research

During the last few years, knowledge production has changed. Higher education institutions are exposed to a ‘tectonic shift’ in the relationship between agricultural science and the economy, bringing with it many challenges, but also new opportunities to create and diffuse new technologies (Etzkowitz, 2012). ‘Borderless education’– one of the consequences of globalisation and digital transformation – has been a key enabler for the paradigm shift in knowledge creation. While physical communication and travel boundaries have been broken down and altered between countries and continents, the global expansion of the sources of information and knowledge with regards to agricultural knowledge has greatly surpassed this. 

There is a growing societal demand for universities to take up the role of translating and communicating knowledge to wider audiences. Some information on agricultural transformation and innovation is poorly translated and disseminated hence the world will not be able to accept it without thorough knowledge of how the innovations work. This has been the greatest undoing in the agricultural sector, witnessed by some countries out rightly rejecting new information simply because they did not understand how it worked. 

Conclusion

There is a need to reconfigure and rethink the logic about the nature and orientation of higher and tertiary education in the SADC region, particularly on ensuring food security. People have to be dedicated to the development of higher and tertiary education so that they build communities of practice committed to a reform agenda in a bid to engender facilities of orientation, reflection and exploration in higher and tertiary education. Researchers should be pathfinders and explorers that are prepared to reinvent and reimagine the form, content and orientation of higher and tertiary education systems so that they can have an impact on the agricultural sector so as to mitigate food insecurity in the region. 

 

Eunice Makuvire

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