Exploring the social learning value enabled by affordances of the food for US mobile application: The story of a South African food redistribution app

Abstract

This paper reviews the research undertaken in a social learning and innovation project focusing on food surplus redistribution, via a mobile application project called ‘Food for Us'. This initiative was pilot tested in two study sites, namely Worcester, Western Cape and the Raymond Mhlaba municipality, Eastern Cape in South Africa. In South Africa, one-third of the food produced for consumption is wasted, whilst 26% of all households’ experience hunger. Food surplus occurs in many contexts, including communities of emerging small-scale farmers, many of which aren't able to find markets for their products resulting in wastage. In a time of mobile technology expansion, the wide infiltration of internet-enabled smartphones into diverse communities has increased dramatically with the uptake of mobile applications being a key area of interest amongst environmental educators. The Food for Us application project aims to address the challenges of food insecurity and market access for small-scale farmers by creating an innovative technological solution in the form of a mobile application. The Food for Us mobile application and social learning research project aimed to investigate the social learning that was enabled within the communities of practice that utilized and interacted with the Food for Us mobile application. The Food for Us mobile application aimed to reduce on-farm food surplus by providing a tool on which small-scale farmer could find alternative markets for their unsold produce. This paper will look at the key findings that emerged out of the first phase of the project including the important social learning findings; instances of boundary crossing and intergenerational learning and network building, as well as the recommendations that have emerged that surround the need to develop strong social networked systems around technological innovative solutions to promote the realization of transformative value.