The main objective of the RUAF-CFF programme is to contribute to urban poverty reduction, urban food security, improved urban environmental management, empowerment of urban and peri-urban farmers and participatory city governance. The RUAF-CFF project will directly contribute to achieving MDGs (Millennium Development Goals) 1 and 7 namely, eradication of extreme poverty and hunger and ensuring environmental sustainability.
To realise this objective, the programme applied an integrated approach with six components, which mutually reinforce each other and in combination will deliver the desired results. These were,
- Consolidation of the regional RUAF: Strengthening the actual “Regional focal points on UPA” in order to become sustainable and effective Regional Resource Centres on UPA that provide information services, training and policy advice to municipalities, NGO’s and other national and local stakeholders in urban agriculture in their region.
- Capacity Development: Development of the required training capacity and organisation of training activities to enhance the capacities of local stakeholders in UPA (Municipal Departments, farmer organisations, NGO’s, research institutes, planners) for the successful engagement in multi-stakeholder policy design and action planning and implementation on UPA.
- Knowledge management: Design and targeted distribution of guidelines, information packages, working methodologies and instruments by the various local stakeholders and improvement of their access to relevant information as well as maintenance of databases and publication of Urban Agriculture Magazine.
- Facilitating Participatory Policy formulation and Action planning: Assisting in the realisation of processes of multi-stakeholder policy formulation and action planning including a/o the realisation of policy awareness seminars, participatory appraisals, participatory design and implementation of pilot projects.
- Gender mainstreaming: Ensuring that training, policy formulation, project development and monitoring activities are gender sensitive by integration of gender in all RUAF methodologies and instruments, training activities, and gender differentiated project design and monitoring systems as well as by commissioning gender case studies and preparation of guidelines and publications on gender and UPA.
- Promoting learning from monitoring: Ensuring that all local actors participating in the programme start using participatory and results oriented process and impact monitoring methods.
The CFF activities are taking pace in seven regions and in each region the focus is on 3 pilot cities (20 in total) and about 10 dissemination cities (47 in total).
In south and South East Asia region, the focus is on 3 pilot cities [Magadi (India), Hyderabad (India) and Gampaha (Sri Lanka)] and about 3 dissemination cities [Bangalore (India), Cagyan de Oro (the Philippines) and Colombo (Sri Lanka)]; participated in the RUAF-CFF program. It stimulated the formulation of participatory multi-stakeholder platforms, critically assessed local policies, developed City Strategy Agendas and implemented action plans on urban/periurban agriculture in the three pilot cities, to support and promote periurban agriculture among the poor and farming households, while safeguarding municipal concerns related to health and other issues.