Good Food for Cities

Building bridges for sustainable and healthy food for all

What is at stake?

Millions of smallholder farmers face limited production capacity and access to technology and finance, making them increasingly vulnerable to economic shocks and other disruptions. Food safety issues are also a major concern for consumers.

In addition, managing food loss and food waste to reduce the footprint in the food system is another challenge. Limited investment in logistics and storage facilities has caused high food losses, which expose system inefficiencies and pose considerable aggregate costs. The availability of unhealthy, less nutritious food is increasing due to modern technologies, which is undermining the health of young children and contributing to the alarming increase in overweight and obesity among children and adolescents in urban and peri-urban areas.

Finally, food systems have multiple implications for the environment. Unsustainable practices like intensive farming and environmentally unfriendly processing technologies are leading to climate change, degradation, and pollution of natural resources. Farmers' overusing fertilisers and pesticides has also adversely impacted both farmers' health and the environment. The need to balance the increasing demand for food in urban areas while ensuring sustainability in production and reducing negative environmental impacts is a significant challenge.  

At Rikolto, we believe that cities offer critical opportunities to test innovations in ways that keep urban food systems within the ecological limits of the planet, while meeting the needs of urban dwellers and food chain workers.

Our Purpose

To catalyse collective action among local food system actors to make urban food environments and food supply chains more conducive to healthy, sustainable and nutritious diets for all citizens as part of resilient and inclusive city region food systems.

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Our Impact

We catalyse collective action among local food system actors to make urban food environments and supply chains more conducive to healthy, sustainable and nutritious diets for all citizens. Our Good Food for Cities programme operates in five cities in Indonesia and four in Vietnam. Our ambition for 2026 is to pilot and scale the adoption of inclusive food system innovations that directly improve access to healthy, sustainable, and nutritious food.

Our Approach

A Sustainable Food Systems approach

Anchored in the Sustainable Food Systems framework, the Good Food For Cities programme approaches urban food systems through a systems-thinking lens.

Co-creation, multi-stakeholder collaborations and learning are at the heart of this approach. We strive to build interconnections between actors and to foster collective action mechanisms through participatory and inclusive food governance structures.

We try to understand how different areas are connected to each other and to identify levers for systems change that help us to navigate difficult trade-offs, such as how to improve access to affordable healthy food, while incentivising farmers and food chain workers to adopt more sustainable practices.

Inclusive business facilitation

Inclusive business is essential for incentivising smallholder producers in rural, urban and peri-urban areas to produce and market crops that contribute to sustainable and healthy diets. Inclusive business translates into a fair and transparent collaboration between all actors in the food chain (e.g. open communication, fair prices, risk-sharing), driven by a common goal and leading to a more stable market and supply of quality food to cities. It is built on equitable access to services such as credit, technical support and market information and is supported by inclusive innovation that helps make the chain more efficient and fairer. Coupled with strong market demand, it is a key element of the pull factor that contributes to stronger rural urban linkages.

Read more about our work on inclusive markets.

Our Strategies

Rikolto's strategy focuses on three pillars: sustainable production, inclusive food markets and an enabling environment.

Sustainable production to bring good food to cities

Industrial farming techniques, which have largely prioritised yields over resilience and environmental sustainability, have already degraded around a third of the world's soils, including in Asia regions.

  • In order to provide healthy, nutritious food such as fruit, vegetables and pulses for local markets, Rikolto focuses on preserving food landscapes, promoting regenerative agriculture and improving farmers' resilience to climate change and other shocks.
By Rikolto's support in sustainable agriculture practices, farmers of Chuc Son cooperative have now better awareness on the social responsibilities, environmental protection, soil and water conservation and have more efforts to bring safe products to consumers.

Inclusive urban food markets, so that no one is left behind

For healthier and more sustainable food to reach urban markets, there must be incentives for behaviour change at all stages of the chain. Inclusive business relationships are therefore a powerful enabler of the transition to sustainable food systems in cities and beyond. To contribute to more inclusive markets, we focus on:

  • Food Markets 4 All, where we work on the professionalisation of farmers’ organisations, including facilitating better access to finance and business development services and the promotion of inclusive business models.
  • Through GoodFood@School, we provide tailored support to schools and a wide range of actors within the schools’ environment to make healthy and sustainable food the new normal for students. Our aim is to make it easier for pupils to have a sustainable diet, focusing on ingredients that are sustainably sourced, traceable and nutritious.
In parallel, we promote the scaling up of good practices through city-level and national multi-stakeholder initiatives. In Surakarta, Indonesia, our partner Gita Pertiwi led the co-development and piloting of a healthy, nutritious, safe and environmentally friendly canteen standard. In 2021, the standard was circulated by the city authorities as the procedure for all schools in Surakarta.
  • Through our Generation Food business creation and incubation programme, we support ambitious young entrepreneurs in the establishment of sustainable food businesses that contribute to solving some of the key issues in their city region’s food system.
  • Finally, we support the design of Circular Food Economy models that help avoid, reduce and valorise food losses, waste and surpluses.

Enabling environment

Under this third pillar, our interventions seek to incentivise sustainable and healthy diets through policies, collective learning and new partnerships. Below are some of the initiatives we support in our network.

  • Urban food governance processes: we facilitate or contribute to multi-stakeholder dialogues or platforms at city level that help create a shared understanding of local food system issues, build a common vision and create a collective strategy or action plan on how to put it into practice.
  • Food citizenship: we curate dialogues between citizens and the private sector to make healthy and sustainable food the easy choice and facilitate the co-creation of new solutions between citizens, researchers, retailers and public authorities.
  • Peer-to-peer learning: we facilitate exchanges between partner and non-partner cities and stakeholders to inspire them to take action.
  • Investments in food system transformation: we engage financial institutions and (impact) investors to create financial products that are accessible for SMEs, and particularly small-scale food chain actors and entrepreneurs.
  • Multi-level governance: we facilitate discussions between local actors and national authorities on how they can enable cities to take action.
  • Evidence building and methodology development: we create and disseminate evidence and methodologies related to the innovations and models that we support to encourage investments in their replication.

Who do we work with?

Rikolto works with a variety of partners across many sectors, including:

  • Local authorities such as municipal departments of agriculture, education and health, market management authorities, schools and district and provincial authorities.
  • Farmers’ organisations: farmers’ groups and cooperatives
  • Private sector partners such as SMEs active throughout the food chain and business development service providers.
  • Academic and research institutions such as universities and international research networks.
  • Funders and investors such as the Belgian Directorate General for Development, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, the Agroecology Learning alliance in South East Asia, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and more!

Find below a non-exhaustive list of the networks to which we contribute:

Contact

Nonie Kaban

Good Food for Cities Programme Director in Southeast Asia / Good Food for Cities Programme Manager in Indonesia

nonie.kaban@rikolto.org

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