Recycling organic waste into soil amendments and animal feed through a transdisciplinary approach – this is what the RUNRES project, launched in four sub-Saharan African countries four years ago, seeks to achieve. Now the promising results of the first phase are to be upscaled.

The RUNRES project – in full, The Rural-Urban Nexus: Establishing a Nutrient Loop to Improve City Region Food System Resilience – aims to set a key step in the transformation towards a circular and more sustainable agriculture and waste management in four city regions of sub-Saharan African countries: DR Congo, Ethiopia, Rwanda and South Africa. It 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). The aim of the first phase was to pilot a set of innovations and evaluate their ability to contribute to a circular economy by linking organic waste management to agriculture. For this, we took a transdisciplinary research approach, where we co-produced the different innovations with different actors: waste collectors, farmers’ cooperatives, collection and treatment companies, and regulators. This approach made it possible to co-develop innovations between science and practice that are tailored for the local context.

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