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The African Economic Research Consortium (AERC) in collaboration with the Economic Research Forum (ERF) and Partnership for Economic Policy (PEP), hosted a very successful dissemination workshop on theme “Impacts of War in Ukraine on Food Security in Low Income Countries“ on May 13, 2024.  

During the official opening session of the workshop, Dr. Abbi Kedir, AERC’s Director of Research in his introductory remarks noted that reorganization of Africa’s agricultural sector is long overdue, given the fact that the continent has not been able to adequately feed itself. “We need to orient agricultural countries toward self-sufficiency in terms of food security”, he said. 

Professor Bohlmann, Research Director of the Macro-micro Policy Modelling group at the PEP observed that this project provides a template for other countries to investigate these important issues, while Dr Arjan de Haan, Senior Program Specialist at the IDRC said that it is always a wonderful experience to work with AERC, adding that the workshops are a great opportunity to share outcomes.

The AERC is currently implementing a collaborative research project on “Impacts of War in Ukraine on Food Security in Low Income Countries“ funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) Global Affairs Canada. The overall objective of the collaborative research effort is to support policy responses that are evidence-informed and gender-responsive, to address the current impacts of the war on food security and enhance longer-term resilience to shocks for vulnerable populations in low-income countries in Africa and the Middle East. 

The specific objectives of the project are: Investigate gender-differentiated impacts of the crises at household and economy-wide levels and assess the gender sensitivity of existing policy responses; analyze the effect of macroeconomic shocks or mitigation policies on socioeconomic indicators at individual or household levels; and analyze the impact of the Russia-Ukraine war measures across different economic sectors as well as investigate the distributional impact of these measures on different types of groups, to help identify optimum policy responses in specific contexts and effective for particularly vulnerable groups.

The workshop was chaired by Professor Dirk Willem te Velde of the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), London and these two papers were presented in the workshop: Impact of the war in Russia-Ukraine on the African economies Egypt and Kenya: A gendered macro-micro modelling assessment by Dickson Wandeda Onyango, Kenneth Kigundu Macharia, Dianah Ngui and Lanoi Maloiy; and The Impact of Russia-Ukraine War Policy Interventions across different economic sectors in Kenya with gender dimension by Jorge Davalosa, Martin Henselera, and  Helene Maisonnavea. These papers were developed by AERC and PEP.