CAT Africa

Business case

Impacts on the financial condition of a company, as well as the the economicconditions of its stakeholders and on economic systems at local, national, andglobal levels.

Economic Impact

Efficiency gains on operations or transactions either through cultural or technological shifts

Productivity

Impact on the ease of innovation, and facilitating uptake of innovations

Innovation

Scalability

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

Solidify definitions and create frameworks to support the understanding of the circular economy across contexts and maintain cohesive systems of data sharing, processing and storing.


 Knowledge Management

Impacts

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Industries

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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

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Based on the work of [Bocken et al. (2016)](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309699661_Product_design_and_business_model_strategies_for_a_circular_economy), the Four Flows Framework serves as a simple framework for managing resource flows in a circular economy by using less (Narrow), using for longer (Slow), using again (Cycle), and using clean, regenerative materials and energy (Regenerate).

These different principles of circular economy can be applied to our socioeconomic metabolism: we can design stocks like buildings, infrastructure, machinery, and vehicles to be rich resource mines for the future, and design manufactured goods and consumables to be cycled and made regenerative. Furthermore, the focus must also centre on getting more value out of fewer materials. Achieving the aims of a circular economy—minimising material use, regenerating the Earth, and preventing material losses—can be done through these four key strategies mentioned above.

Source: Circle Economy. (2023). *[The circularity gap report 2023](https://www.circularity-gap.world/2023)* (p.22). Amsterdam: Circle Economy. 

Four Flows Framework

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  The first half of 2020 has been marked with the food market and agri-dealer closures, trade blockages, labor shortages, manufacturing and processing plant closures, shortages of certain food products as buying patterns shifted and bulk buyers such as restaurants or canteens faced closures, and other logistical and tactical issues. As the pandemic has progressed and implications have expanded beyond the immediate healthcare needs to the broader societal, economic and knock-on implications of this crisis, global, regional and local food systems have begun to face immense pressures that threaten to undermine nutrition at a mass scale and provoke food shortages as primary food production is implicated. COVID-19 has also laid bare the food system’s underlying injustices and inequities.

 However, the crisis has also brought widespread awareness of tools that are currently underutilized by the food and agriculture sectors, and which – if leveraged intentionally and inclusively – can have a seismic impact on the food system’s ability to respond and rebound in times of crisis. One such tool is data.

 This report seeks to advance the actionable understanding of an emerging set of approaches for data-driven food systems across stakeholders. It explores opportunities for data to enable better decision-making, advance business, product and partnership models, and empower stakeholders across the value chain. It highlights examples showcasing these models in practice. And it recognizes that for our food systems to be better prepared and more resilient in the future, we will need to promote a culture of data that allows for success and scale, and which is supported by key enablers, including policy, capacity building, infrastructure and connectivity, and mobilizing leadership.

 This report forms part of a series of outcomes stemming from the COVID Action for Food Systems – Africa multistakeholder efforts launched by African Union Development Agency (AUDA-NEPAD) in collaboration with the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the World Economic Forum. It was developed as an output of the Data and Information Platforms working group, and was supported by the World Economic Forum’s Food System Initiative (Platform for Global Public Goods) and the Shaping the Future of Digital Economy and New Value Creation platform.
 

Africa

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The World Economic Forum is the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation.

The Forum engages the foremost political, business, cultural and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas.

It was established in 1971 as a not-for-profit foundation and is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. It is independent, impartial and not tied to any special interests. The Forum strives in all its efforts to demonstrate entrepreneurship in the global public interest while upholding the highest standards of governance. Moral and intellectual integrity is at the heart of everything it does.

World Economic Forum

Dalberg

African Union Development Agency (AUDA-NEPAD)

International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD)

<p>By utilizing these emerging data-driven solutions for food and agriculture and viewing them as part of a wider economic enabling framework, partnerships can be leveraged and scaled. Data from satellite and geospatial operators, ICT and telecommunications providers, e-commerce and logistics companies, and finance providers could all be brought to bear, alongside data from other actors who intersect the food space, such as the mining sector’s land utilization patterns. These corresponding data sets brought together in a joint ecosystem that informs the wider economic and societal development can thereby create a much greater transformational effect.</p>