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This collection is part of Footprints Africa's work to build a comprehensive database of circular economy initiatives in Africa. 

This is a result of the collaboration with the <a href="https://www.acen.africa" target="_blank">African Circular Economy Network (ACEN)</a>, as part of the programme to support the circular economy transition in Africa. Footprints Africa's vision is that businesses can be a force for good at scale. Their mission is to advance sustainable, scalable and inclusive approaches to development of local African economies. Footprints Africa supports SMEs to adopt future-friendly practices, such as those inspired by the circular economy, to address the challenges of growth and create jobs. 

This open-source dataset features well over 500 cases and 200 examples of policies and laws and intent to collect inspiring examples of initiatives from across Africa, in order to inform the global dialogue, which is largely focused on the European and American context. 

To learn more about Africa's initiatives and content to accelerate the transition to a circular economy, visit https://www.footprintsafrica.co/



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Footprints Africa

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Business case

Reduced green house gas emissions released into the biosphere

Reduce Emissions (SDG13)

Reduced use of virgin materials and/or an increase of the use of secondary and bio-based materials

Reduce Material Consumption (SDG12)

Producing agricultural products and processing them into food and beverageproducts for consumption

Agri/Food

Producing and gathering crop and animal products from land and water through farming, hunting, and fishing

Agriculture

Ensure renewable, reusable, non-toxic resources are utilised as materials and energy in an efficient way

Prioritise regenerative resources

Work together throughout the supply chain, internally within organisations and with the public sector and communities to increase transparency and create joint value

Team up to create joint value

 Develop research, structure knowledge, encourage innovation networks and disseminate findings with integrity


Strengthen and advance knowledge

Archetypes

CE Materials

Impacts

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Industries

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Materials

Nace Sectors

The principles of a circular economy concern designing out waste, regenerating ecosystems and keeping items in use. Decoupling the economy from material flows—improving the rate of resource productivity faster than the economic growth rate—is also a consistent guide. By evolving with the growing number of applications of circular economy principles, and consolidating these strategies across thematic areas, Circle Economy’s Key Elements Framework (KE) renders the elements of the circular economy salient and serves as a basis to derive contextual strategies and interventions. 


The Framework consists of:
- Core Elements: Activities directly handling product or material flows; and uniquely,
- Enabling Elements: those that remove obstacles for core actors.


Key elements of the circular economy

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Circle Economy's framework of strategies and activities that define the circular economy

Topics

Urban Opportunities

Whilst no two countries are the same, there are still obvious similarities between some of them, with discernible development patterns and parallels in evidence. Common problems and shared solutions help place unique country identities and individual issues in context.

Whilst this classification is far from clear-cut and exhibits some overlap, it does underline how the discourse on transitioning to a circular economy needs to account for both differences and commonalities, if we are to arrive at a more strategic and instructive analysis. It also allows to highlight a set of key themes that are likely to be central to the countries that fall under the respective profiles. 

Country profiles (Build, Grow, Shift)

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A framework to distinguish between different country profiles and their circular transition needs.

Browse case studies by type of implementing stakeholder.

Implementing stakeholders

It is 2050.  Full systems change has taken place. This wouldn’t have been possible without the immediate action and radical steps taken from 2020 onwards. Many targets had to be identified in the early 2020s and achieved by 2030 to ensure that the 2050 goal happened in full. A sense of urgency, turbo stakeholder collaboration, supportive government regulation and clear, data driven targets enabled the mindsets and systems change needed to transform to a fully circular textiles ecosystem.

A circular economics model underpins what we have created. It reflects and supports a living organism made up of makers, users and restorers, interacting across vibrant and interconnected networks. Checks and balances, alongside transparency and accountability, ensure a healthy system. Financial, environmental, and social metrics have the purpose of serving communities and the planet. There is shared ownership of profit and loss – across all three metrics – throughout the value chain.

This is what we’ve achieved over the last 30 years:

WCTD Themes

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The Circular City Actions Framework provides urban changemakers with five complementary strategies they can use to start working towards a more circular system. 

The framework is action-based to provide users with concrete strategic directions and showcase the desired outcomes of each strategy. 
The framework consists of five complementary **strategies**, under which **sub-strategies** provide further detail. Finally, each sub-strategy consists of a diversity of tangible **solutions** which are framed in relation to key thematic areas. 

Note: solutions are currently focused on:
- 🍏 **Food systems**
- 🏢  **Built environment**
- 👕📱  **Consumer goods**
- ⚡ **Energy Systems**
- 🚌 **Mobility Systems**
- 💧 **Water Systems**

More thematic areas are coming soon...

'Click through each of the five strategy cards below to explore the framework and circular economy case studies in more depth!'



This framework was developed in collaboration with ICLEI, Metabolic and Ellen MacArthur Foundation with support from the MAVA Foundation. Read more about it [here]( https://circulars.iclei.org/action-framework/). 



Circular City Actions Framework

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An action-based framework for local governments working towards circular cities

Thematic Areas

City Stakeholders

Test Framework

Challenges

Based on the ongoing ISO standardisation process, a taxonomy has been defined under which to cluster indicators to measure circularity. 

ISO Taxonomy

If managed well, the transition to the circular economy will have multiple benefits for the labour market, including the opening up of job opportunities, raising job standards and reducing inequalities through a global redistribution of value. But a positive transition to circularity for work and workers must be underpinned by three pillars: upskilling the workforce, quality of work and inclusive job opportunities. Find out more and explore cases that illustrate these pillars below.

Circular Jobs Initiative Pillars

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A positive transition to circularity for work and workers must be underpinned by three core pillars.

This is a survey that dives into understanding the policy environment around specific circular solutions. 

The survey is divided into five sections, based on the five key elements of the Circular Cities Action Framework. 
Each section asks 2-3 questions to explore which policies may or may not be present within your city to support a transition towards a circular economy. 

You are not alone! Each question provides some practical examples from cities around the world that have adopted a certain policy to support their transition. This can help to compare with your city - is your city doing something similar?

The survey answers should be based on your current knowledge, and not illicit additional research - ! Please make use of the Not sure option as appropriate.


Ganbatte Cities Policy Tracker [Food]

Ganbatte Cities - Policy tracker policy instruments

Policy Tracker - TEST

                    
Regenerative agriculture
In 2017 representatives from over 100 countries, including virtually all areas of food production, manufacturing, retailing and soil science have, for the first time, come together on a unified definition for the quickly emerging “Regenerative” approach to growing food that has been shown to provide multiple benefits to food security, health, and climate change.                Regenerative agriculture (RA) describes farming and grazing practices that, among other benefits, reverse climate change by rebuilding soil organic matter and restoring degraded soil biodiversity – resulting in both carbon drawdown and improving the water cycle.   Specifically, RA claims to be a holistic land management practice that leverages the power of photosynthesis in plants to close the carbon cycle, and build soil health, crop resilience and nutrient density. Regenerative agriculture improves soil health, primarily through the practices that increase soil organic matter. This not only aids in increasing soil biota diversity and health, but increases biodiversity both above and below the soil surface, while increasing both water holding capacity and sequestering carbon at greater depths, thus drawing down climate-damaging levels of atmospheric CO2, and improving soil structure to reverse civilisation-threatening human-caused soil loss. RA highlights the damaging effects to soil from tillage, applications of agricultural chemicals and salt-based fertilizers, and carbon mining. RA aims to reverse this paradigm to build for the future.   The key and perhaps biggest shift in emphasis in RA is “that it not only “does no harm”, to or conserve the land, but actually improves it, using technologies that regenerate and revitalize the soil and the environment. RA leads to healthy soil, capable of producing high quality, nutrient dense food while simultaneously improving, rather than degrading land, and ultimately leading to productive farms and healthy communities and economies. It is a dynamic and holistic, incorporating permaculture and organic farming practices, including conservation tillage, cover crops, crop rotation, composting, mobile animal shelters and pasture cropping, to increase food production, farmers’ income and especially, topsoil.” (Regeneration International website https://regenerationinternational.org/about-us/).     These notions are strongly illustrated in the figure on the right.  With respect to regeneration there is a constant search for general inclusive (cathedral) thinking and net positive fertility flows across an array of systems, not just a few.       
There are six core principles of regenerative agriculture, highlighted below              Conservation vs Regenerative agriculture
Although CA and RA use slightly different definitions and place emphasis on different words, they are essentially the same. Both approaches share the same principles and can achieve the same environmental, and socio-economic outcomes if all the principles and practices are applied correctly. The principle of ‘context’ and a greater emphasis on living roots and livestock by RA help to create a bigger awareness among farmers and other practitioners about their role and function, specifically on soil health. Both approaches can regenerate (restore or improve) and protect natural resources with the potential of a drastic reduction in external inputs, even to the level of an organic standard, although there is a strong perception that RA lean much more towards the latter, while CA has the association of being using high amounts of agro-chemicals. Integra Trust’s view is to be inclusive and to accommodate both approaches and supporters (including other relevant approaches), since they have both a wealth of resources and supporters passionate about the same end-goals. However, whichever definition is used, it would be important to highlight the principles and practices, which are really having the desired impact after all. For that purpose, we will adopt the use of the all-inclusive six principles of RA illustrated by the figure above. Hence, from all practical purposes, Integra Trust sees the term “Regenerative agriculture” as inclusive and accommodating of CA and will be used from here on in this document. 
       Regenerative agriculture: adaptation within the context of each farmer 
Extensive global and local experiences and research findings informed the Integra Trust concept development (Kassam et al., 2015; Smith, 2006; Smith et al., 2017). Central to this concept is that the introduction of complicated, multi-component technologies such as Regenerative agriculture (RA), into complex socio-economic environments create ‘wicked’ (extremely difficult) challenges and require the development of innovation systems (IS) to adapt technologies to local conditions, which critically place the farmer in the central role. Indeed, the only way this radical transformation could have happened in many countries (in most cases without appropriate research, education, training and support services in place) was the leading role of farmers themselves and the opportunities they have created to act, observe, share, learn, reflect and adapt (through constructive communication, interaction and dialogue) with other key interested farmers and stakeholders. In these cases, RA has in fact been ‘constructed’ on farms and by farmers for decades (Coughenour and Chamla, 2000).
The IS model recognises that each farmer is already on a RA development journey and has a significant level of innovation capacity. It implies that each farmer will develop and adapt a RA system in his/her own biophysical, social and economic context or reality, on his/her own pace. The Integra Trust model’s function is to create an environment and facilitate the involvement of technical, financial and infrastructure support to further enhance the farmer innovation process (for both commercial and smallholder farmers) by applying a family of initiatives and mechanisms to facilitate financing, awareness, learning, research and adaptation, all together in one holistic model.
Underlying the Integra Trust model is autopoiesis, which refers to a system capable of reproducing and maintaining itself (Maturana and Varela, 1980), such as any living system, including healthy soil or even a plant cell. It is a self-regenerative system made-up by the components and processes in its structure or network. RA’s principles per se are in effect and largely intended to protect the system as unaltered as possible thereby leaving and restoring, where necessary, as many as possible of the existing, extensive matrix of autopoietic processes that manage the particular system in place and in control (Tonie Putter, personal communication). In summary, autopoiesis is what is needed to have (information, resources, components and processes) in order to keep (sustain and regenerate) that what is required to have (healthy soil and food) alive and in good condition (with integrity) to ensure both our survival and that of our descendants. Indeed, the property of emergence (e.g. of innovation and regeneration) is important in complex autopoietic systems, as well as synergy, by which the action of the whole is more than the sum of the actions of the parts.
                  
ASSET Research
https://assetresearch.org.za/ has been established in the early part of the century as an independent research and capacity building vehicle, and NPO/PBO to advance environmental economic and related research.  James Blignaut, martin de Wit and James Aronson are the directors.         
ReStory
This has not yet been discussed, but an option would be for Integra Trust to take joint ownership of ReStory together with ASSET Research.
ReStory website and blog (www.restory.co.za) has being developed by James Blignaut through ASSET Research to advance the dialogue in restoration (broadly defined) and to promote a culture of restoration.        
RegenAg SA
RegenAG SA (https://regenagsa.org.za/) was started to advance the case for regenerative agriculture in South Africa by building community amongst existing practitioners and providing information, community, and support for interested farmers and consumers.   
RegenAG SA works closely with Integra especially I-Link, promoting the I-Score and providing a platform to link regenerative agronomists and regenerative farmers from all around the country.       
Structured Growth 
A multi-faceted partnership with http://www.structuredgrowth.co.za/ is being developed.  There is great overlap in values and in purpose with respect to the promotion of regenerative agriculture.  http://www.structuredgrowth.co.za/ has a unique package of crop insurance and a pro-active approach towards risk insurance with respect to regenerative agriculture.  While no formal agreement exists yet, informal collaboration happens on a broad scale and is to be promoted.              

South Africa

Africa

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Footprints Africa supports SMEs to adopt future-friendly practices, address the challenges of growth and create jobs, using supply chains as a tool for development. 

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Integra Trust

<p>Integra promotes regenerative agriculture through their community-based initiatives. They are proponents of producing, distributing, and utilising food with integrity, and aim to heal the land and the people. They also support farmers to adopt regenerative agricultural principles to restore degraded agricultural soil.</p>