Organisational innovations in Ghanaian food system: application of the “SYAM” concept

Sy Mariam, Soullier Guillaume, Sirdey Ninon. 2023. Organisational innovations in Ghanaian food system: application of the “SYAM” concept. Montpellier : CIRAD, 46 p.

Résumé : The SyAM concept was developed to characterize value chains organization that are intermediate in size in terms of the number of actors involved and the quantity of products farmed. They involve actors from short and long supply chains, and they reveal hybrid organizational forms and values. It has been mobilized by a French group of researchers and practionners and some reflections have been initiated from 2020 to explore to what extent this concept may renew our understanding of food systems' dynamics in Sub-Saharan Africa. This report presents results on research conducted in Ghana: (1) an inventory of diversified organizational initiatives that could be analyzed with the SyAM concept, based on secondary data, and applying a simplified analysis grid. (2) the results of three contrasting case studies, based on interviews with several stakeholders of the initiatives. The SYAM concept shows the activities of SMES in Ghana go beyond the value chain, by including NGOs and community actors. This concept therefore shed light on the values of actors implementing transactions, which can be related to environment, health, or religion. The Ghanaian cases studied in this report are mostly based on entrepreneurship and less on collective efforts for common interests or a local authority that wants to support innovative value chain organizations as an instrument for the local policies to relocalize agriculture and food. But it is a medium-scale and national entrepreneurship, unlike what we see in modern value chains, and it clearly hybrids some social and environmental values to business objectives. The social values promoted mostly takes the form of women's entrepreneurship and economic empowerment, while the environmental ones are related to uncertified organic agriculture. Bilateral oral or written agreements observed in the Ghanaian cases studies move away from traditional forms of value chains' governance. Yet, it remains less innovative than the governance modes based on collectively negotiated agreements involving at least three segments of the chains that have been observed in France and conceptualized through the SYAM concept. These case studies enable a first discussion of the usefulness of the SyAM concept to analyze organizational innovations in sub-Saharan Africa. The SyAM concept seems therefore enriching other alternative food systems concepts by emphasizing on the hybridization of objectives and governance modes and the social and environmental values of actors. Further case studies should be conducted to continue testing this hypothesis.

Mots-clés libres : Value chain, Filière, Ghana, Système alimentaire, Food system

Auteurs et affiliations

• Sy Mariam
• Soullier Guillaume, CIRAD-ES-UMR ART-DEV (GHA) ORCID: 0000-0003-1988-7994
• Sirdey Ninon, CIRAD-ES-UMR MOISA (FRA)

Source : Cirad-Agritrop (https://agritrop.cirad.fr/604242/)

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