From the land to the table: what leadership looks like in Africa’s food systems 

The idea that good leadership is essential for any kind of societal progress is not a new one. Societies have been organising themselves in structures with recognised leaders as far back as human history goes. Yet, documented evidence on how exactly leadership works in practice remains scarce and fragmented. This is especially so in food systems where much of the attention has been on building physical infrastructure for transformation, rather than the people on whose decisions the system rises or falls. 

“There are growing calls for a better understanding of how exactly leadership drives transformation in food systems. What are the actual behaviours and habits that make a difference? Who does what, where, with whom, when, and why? These are the big questions that the African Food Fellowship is grappling with,” said AFF Research Lead Brenda Namugumya. 

To answer these questions, the Fellowship is running a series of conversations with respected food systems leaders who can share their leadership practice, and in doing so, generate much-needed evidence and documentation of how change happens. 

Dubbed the AFF insight sessions, these discussions are creating an interesting picture:  the people reshaping how food is grown, moved, and eaten rarely fit the image of a leader standing at a podium. More often, they are a district land-use officer co-designing farmland with communities, a grandmother who taught her granddaughter how to negotiate, a fish trader in a Zambian market whose cooperative just changed how an entire value chain works, or a researcher seeking new insights about the food provisioning processes in different contexts. 

“Our speakers so far have generously shared their lived experiences, including the decisions that they have made at crucial times, the collaborations they have sought, their successes and failures, to help us better understand the concept of leadership. We’re learning that leadership is in the small details that shape everyday life, not the grand ambitions declared on big stages,” said Brenda. 

Two sessions in, and a shared thread is already visible: whether the subject is a hillside undergoing restoration or a roadside market stall, transformation rarely traces back to one person’s vision. It traces back to networks and the people willing to cross boundaries, share power, and stay in the work long enough for trust to take root. 

Session One: Leadership for sustainable landscapes 

The series opened in March 2026 with a session on leadership for sustainable landscapes. This topic sounds technical until you consider what a landscape actually is: a piece of ground that a farmer, a conservationist, an energy developer, a tourism operator, and a local community may all claim a stake in, simultaneously, often under different laws written by different levels of government. Deciding how that land gets used, restored, or protected is as much a negotiation as it is a policy exercise. The session asked a pointed question — what kind of leadership can navigate that negotiation and a arrive at a place of communal benefit? 

Cora van Oosten, Director of Capacity Development and Education at CIFOR-ICRAF, opened with a blunt framing drawn from her own career across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

“Landscapes demand a shift from leadership to “teamship”,”

Cora van Oosten

Her reasoning is that the complexities of landscapes simply do not allow any one entity, no matter how strong and well-resourced, to hold the whole picture.  

“Leaders need to recognise their own role as well as the rights of others in the landscape puzzle. The agency of different actors needs to be  strengthened to facilitate authentic distributed forms of leadership embedded in institutions, communities, and learning systems,” she emphasized.  

She was in conversation with Alexis Rutagengwa, an African Food Fellow who directs Participatory Planning for Sustainable Land Use at Rwanda’s National Land Authority. He grounded the teamship in a live case study. Rwanda’s land pressures are acute: high population density, fast urbanisation, and a history of what he called “uncoordinated land use decisions that caused inefficient and scattered development.”  

Alexis’s work has been to run participatory processes that build district-level land-use master plans from the ground up, balancing food security against growth. The resulting national allocation — 47% of land for agriculture, close to 30% for forestry and conservation, and the rest split between urban infrastructure and water and protected areas — is the product of communities negotiating directly, not simply receiving a plan handed down from above.  

“The participatory process is what gave the plans staying power. It built local ownership, cut down land-use conflict, and lifted agricultural productivity, while a public geoportal now keeps land information open and contestable rather than hidden inside government offices,”

Alexis Rutagengwa

The key takeaway from the session was that leadership for landscapes has to be collective, relational, and stubbornly local. It has to be willing to cross institutional and disciplinary lines, and it has to treat money as a tool for building cooperation across sectors, not just funding isolated projects. 

Session Two: Leadership for food environments 

In May 2026, the series turned from land to plate. It focused on the everyday environments that shape how people actually eat. Where Session One dealt largely with formal governance, Session Two went looking for leadership in places policy rarely acknowledges: informal markets, women’s cooperatives, and household kitchens. 

Dr Pamela Marinda of the University of Zambia opened with a description of the forces squeezing Africa’s food environments at once, citing rapid urbanisation, a nutrition transition toward more processed diets, the continued dominance of informal markets, and worsening climate variability. Her central claim was that no policy alone reshapes a food environment; it takes community-level agency, and that agency is already there, waiting to be recognised.  

“Leaders can emerge and lead from any seat, any community, and at any stage of life. Leaders often learn from peers, engage in local experimentation, and form informal networks to facilitate collective action,”

Dr Pamela Marinda

She traced her own path back to mentorship from women in her family, and to two decades running agricultural and nutrition projects across East and Southern Africa. That experience shaped her central argument: grassroots leadership — smallholder farmers, women’s cooperatives, youth groups — is already reshaping food environments through community organising, informal knowledge systems like farmer-managed seed exchanges, and market innovation among informal traders.  

She pointed to community-led fish value chain projects in Zambia and Malawi, including CULTIAF, Fish4Zambia, and FishFirst Zambia, as live examples of women-led cooperatives changing how a food system works from inside it.  

“What sustains that kind of leadership isn’t charisma but a mix of systems thinking, communication, and community engagement skills. It needs institutional backing to remove the barriers that keep women, in particular, out of formal leadership roles,” she said. 

Prof Richmond Aryeetey of the University of Ghana offered a different vantage point: the researcher learning to become a change agent. He described his own shift from an academic focused on publishing to someone using evidence to co-create solutions with policymakers. His journey has been shaped by mentorship. His experience at the African Nutrition Leadership Program and later the Scaling Up Nutrition Movement taught him to mobilise fellow academics toward collective policy influence.  

His diagnosis of what holds transformation back was that research routinely fails to translate into action because local data is scarce and actors rarely coordinate.  

“Research can generate evidence, but it needs to include different leadership capacities to co-create solutions and bridge policies and practice,”

Prof Richmond Aryeetey

The leadership capacities he named as essential went beyond technical skill. They include working across institutions and geographic boundaries, navigating ethical grey zones, shifting mindsets about what a healthy diet even looks like, and negotiating across cultural difference.  

Everything rises and falls with leadership 

Read together, some shared lessons emerge from both sessions. Leadership is collective rather than singular, and it is relational, built on trust that has to be earned across lines of jurisdiction, sector, and culture. 

Both sessions also converge on a quieter point: the leaders doing this work are frequently invisible in conventional accounts of change. A district planning officer running consultations, a market trader organising her peers, a researcher learning to sit at a policy table do not look like the leadership Africa’s development narratives usually spotlight. This is why AFF’s work in building this evidence base is so essential. The next session is slated for August 2026.