Article

Growing a Critical Mass of Food Systems Leaders in Africa: Lessons from the African Food Fellowship

2026-09-15 · By Carlo Cucchi, Food and Seed Systems Advisor, Wageningen Social & Economic Research, Wageningen University & Research (WUR), and Brenda Shenute Namugumya, Food and Nutrition Security Advisor, Wageningen Social & Economic Research, Wageningen University & Research (WUR)

The African Food Fellowship is building a critical mass of food systems leaders across Africa. Drawing on five years of experience in Kenya, Rwanda and Zambia, this article shares lessons on selecting emerging leaders, developing systems leadership skills, using flexible capital to unlock action, and creating networks capable of driving lasting food systems transformation.

The Need for Food Systems Leadership

Globally, our societies are grappling with a wide range of systemic challenges, such as the destruction of natural ecosystems, growing water scarcity, malnutrition and obesity, youth unemployment, poverty, and inequalities of income, wealth, and opportunity. In the food and agriculture sector, global initiatives like the 2021 United Nations Food Systems Summit are shifting narratives and making a compelling case for system-wide approaches to challenges such as these. However, systems change discussions too often focus on where or how to invest, and what technology, policy, or infrastructure solutions are needed. A critical open question is, who will do this important work?

Transforming food systems requires an investment in leadership, first and foremost. It requires a special form of leadership, system leadership, aimed at fostering coordinated, collective action. And it requires system leadership at scale: not only among CEOs, heads of state, government ministers or members of prestigious scientific panels, but also from entrepreneurs, mid-career executives, program managers, researchers, and members of agricultural communities.

The African Food Fellowship

IKEA Foundation recognized this need, and in 2021, approved an €8 million grant to launch the African Food Fellowship, an initiative co-founded by Wageningen University and Research (WUR) and Wasafiri Consulting Limited to build a critical mass of food systems leaders in Africa, starting in Kenya, Rwanda and Zambia.

The African Food Fellowship selects dynamic, mid-career professionals with system leadership potential and offers a 10-month training program, membership in a vibrant network of graduates (Fellows), and support for innovative, collaborative approaches to specific food systems challenges in their countries and domains of expertise.

The African Food Fellowship now includes more than 293 Fellows across business, government, civil society, academia, and the media, with more than 70 new candidates recruited each year. We count more than 20,000 followers on LinkedIn, engage actively in continental conferences, and are sought after for collaboration with other African organizations focused on food systems and leadership. We have secured additional funding from funders like the Small Foundation and GIZ.

The African Food Fellowship is now entering a new phase as an independent, Africa-based initiative with a new director. In our five years incubating this initiative, WUR and Wasafiri have learned a number of lessons about how to build a critical mass of food systems leaders in Africa. These lessons should be relevant to others grappling with systemic challenges around the world.

Insight #1: Find the right people

The African Food Fellowship’s mission is to empower the “many Mandelas” that Senge et al. describe in their seminal SSIR article The Dawn of System Leadership. But the African Food Fellowship is not for everybody. Changing food systems is a serious and demanding task. It requires people with the right knowledge, experience, backgrounds, perspectives, and personality traits. We use formal selection criteria, such as experience in food systems and a track record of influencing change, and we look for clues embedded in their histories. For example, where does the applicant’s motivation come from? Do they have a history of helping, guiding, and supporting others? Are they already engaged in networks or communities of practice?

To find the right people, we found critical to invest in a strong outreach machine up front. We leaned heavily on our own institutional and personal networks, and built new alliances with other organizations working on leadership and food systems. Over time, Fellows themselves became our best marketers: in our latest recruitment rounds in Kenya and Rwanda, around 30% of candidates invited for interviews were recommended by our Fellows.

Insight #2: System leadership is a collective endeavor, but individual leadership skills are crucial to it

We knew we were working with highly qualified mid-career professionals: entrepreneurs, researchers, scientists, and public servants with deep technical expertise and sectoral knowledge. Hence, the central design question for our 10-month leadership development program was: what else did Fellows need to unleash transformative, systemic change?

The core focus of the African Food Fellowship’s leadership development program is growing skills that help Fellows connect with others across perspectives, socioeconomic backgrounds, institutional roles, and levels of access to resources within the food systems using diverse methods like stakeholder role play, leadership interviews, systems mapping, foresight and scenario, virtual field visits, and one-one-mentorship.

In the beginning, we intentionally stayed away from more mainstream approaches to personal or individual leadership development, but we found that our Fellows needed to build contemplative and conscious leadership skills such as self-awareness, reflection and accountability, and the ability to navigate uncertainties, and added these to the curriculum. Furthermore, because mindset shift is perhaps the most powerful lever for systems change, we also emphasize media training, for example through masterclasses on public speaking, fireside chats on creative storytelling, and strategy sessions with visual communications experts on how to tell compelling stories and engage diverse audiences.

Insight #3: Small amounts of flexible capital can play an outsize role in getting from training and community-building to action and impact

At the outset, we were emphatic that the African Food Fellowship would not be a funding mechanism. However, this stance overlooked a practical reality we discovered with time: that small amounts of flexible capital could unlock disproportionate momentum and real-world change. We created a fund offering Fellows seed grants of between €500 and €2,500 for experimentation with clearly described food systems actions to be implemented within three months of disbursement.

We have seen flexible capital–combined with peer review and accountability–accelerate the transition from ideas into action by creating a space and a push for Fellows to combine complementary skills, enabling them to make more progress together than they could on their own.

Insight #4: “Meet people where they are, not where you wish them to be”

We know that even the best laid plans do not always produce the expected results. We have learned to approach people with curiosity, patience, and a willingness to learn how best to engage.

For example, we have had to design program activities around the realities of busy working professionals. We noticed that heavy assignments led to disengagement, so we reduced their volume, prioritized depth, and focused on meaningful reflection. In other instances, small operational adjustments, such as changing the application window for recruitment to better fit applicants’ work schedules, proved highly successful. For our first recruitment in Rwanda, for example, we moved the deadline from Friday to Sunday, which generated over 140 additional applications, about 45% of the total applications received.

We also realized that engagement is not linear, and cannot be controlled. We learned to accept that the participation of Fellows in our network naturally fluctuates over time, according to the rhythms of their personal and professional lives. And we learned not to romanticize collective action. Fellows differ in their incentives and approaches. Collaboration does not automatically emerge when motivated people are convened; rather, it emerges through trial and error, negotiation, and sometimes failure.

Closing

We know that the African Food Fellowship is making a difference in Fellows’ lives because they are willing to pay for our offerings. We are well on our way toward a revenue-based financial model. However, we are committed to ensuring that this does not come at the expense of the diversity of our cohorts.

At the same time, we consider food systems leadership a public good that deserves and requires public and philanthropic support. We cannot talk about transforming food systems–or any other systems–without focusing on the people who carry out the day-to-day work of steering and stewarding the process of change. A critical mass of connected systems leaders can exponentially increase the impact of donor funding, impact investment, and commercial finance at the project level and at the system level. By 2035, the African Food Fellowship aims to achieve 5,000 active Fellows in networks across at least 10 diverse African countries, representing public, private, and civil society leadership. Flexible philanthropic support for building system leadership has been critical to the African Food Fellowship, and should be a central part of any systems-oriented funder’s theory of change.