Runres
City Region Food System Resilience
What do we do?
IN A NUTSHELL
RUNRES is a project that addresses the nutrient gradient between urban and rural areas. Broadly speaking, nutrient mining occurs in agricultural areas due to increased food production, while nutrients are accumulated in urban areas where food is consumed.
The main objective of RUNRES is to co-design, test, implement and scale safe, cost-efficient, and socially acceptable innovations to valorize urban and rural waste resources and improve the circular economy related to food and agriculture.
Innovations
Numerous waste streams (green, food, human) currently exist that are not being captured and recycled, especially in urban environments. The approach of RUNRES consists in capturing waste streams and retrieving nutrients into different products. The innovations co-developed in Phase 1 (2019-2023) address three aspects of circular bio-economy:
Soil Input
Organic waste collected from urban centres of the city regions, transported and processed into compost, have the capacity to provide critically needed organic soil inputs for farmers in rural areas.
Animal Feed
By recovering organic waste and cassava peels, RUNRES aims to privide high quality animal products. Our focus is:
- Rearing black soldier flies’ larvae with organic waste to produce animal feed.
- Treating cassava peels through fermentation to remove aflatoxins and cyanides, drying, and grinding for animal feed supplement.
Human Consumption and Safety
The use of organic and human waste by farmers poses a number of risks due to possible pathogen and pollutant accumulation in the products. Therefore, we set up a quality assurance programme aiming to measure the following parameters to guarantee the quality of the products: the agronomic parameters, the level of pathogens, for example Escherichia coli or Helminths’ eggs, and the amount of heavy metals.
Where do we work?
RUNRES seeks to improve the resilience of food systems in four different rural-urban regions across Africa. It will encourage organic and human waste recycling by implementing and scaling of viable and acceptable innovations to transform waste into soil amendments or animal feed to serve as an input for agricultural production of smallholders, thereby contributing to food security, and human and environmental health in city region food systems.
RUNRES will improve the resilience of food systems in four different rural-urban regions across Africa
Rwanda
RUNRES will improve the resilience of food systems in four different rural-urban regions across Africa
Ethiopia
RUNRES aims to set a key step in the transformation towards a circular agriculture and waste management
South Africa
RUNRES aims to set a key step in the transformation towards a circular agriculture and waste management
Sponsors and partners
Become a partner
The RUNRES project, aims to set a key step in the transformation towards a circular and more sustainable agriculture and waste management. RUNRES will improve the resilience of food systems in four different rural-urban regions across Africa: DR Congo, Ethiopia, Rwanda and South Africa.
While the initial focus is to be on upscaling the innovations that have been evaluated as suitable for upscaling, we aim in parallel at replicating these innovations in different places with new actors. This will take place through public-private partnerships and through the co-development of business plans with the new actors, with the aim of leveraging financial resources from existing business development institutions.
The project is funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) and entails two main phases: a piloting phase (2019–23) and a scaling-up phase (2023–27).
“As a single mother, this job at MAGGOT farm allows me to support my mother, my brother and my one-year-old daughter. Even though I do not enjoy the smell of this grinded organic waste, I am still happy to come to work every day and interact with my colleagues. I hope that someday I can save enough money to buy a sewing machine. My dream is to become a tailor.”
Julienne Uwase, Kamonyi, Rwanda