Use of Collective Expertise as a Tool to Reinforce Food Safety Management in Africa

Abstract

The Erasmus+ project (2017-2020) entitled Societal Challenges and Governance of African Universities: the case of ALIments in Morocco, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Senegal (DAfrAli) seeks to strengthen the governance capacity of African Higher Education Institutions to mobilize their resources in order to respond to major societal challenges in relation to external stakeholders. A work package consisted of organizing three workshops to use Collective Expertise as a tool for the identification of societal risks, in the area of food safety. These three workshops were conducted in Morocco, in Senegal and in Democratic Republic of Congo. The exercise was performed by country academics with the contribution of the European project partners. Collective Expertise gave results that demonstrated that, with a careful and diversified selection of experts, this methodology can have a deep importance to list the food hazards in a country. The results obtained can induce changes in university curricula, showed the social impacts of food safety, unveiled research needs and training needs for different agents in the food sector and above all the impact in food policy in a country. The collective expertise approach of the determination of hazards also permitted to discuss possible organization models for food risk management in the 3 countries.