Improving Food Security in Kenya: The Development and Application of the Qubed Resilience Methodology to the Kenyan Tomato Value Chain

摘要

The most effective way to make any system better is to describe, analyze, evaluate, and identify opportunities for improvement. Several tools exist that allow for such work to be conducted through the lens of sustainability. The Qube Model, developed at Villanova University, incorporates stakeholders, life cycle stages, and various impact pathways in order to take a systemic look at a project, product, or service. This model is a helpful tool for enforcing whole-systems thinking into sustainability analysis, but is not itself actionable. However, when this model is paired with feedback loops and a resilience framework, thresholds can be established and management mechanisms can be identified. The Qubed Resilience Methodology, an integration of these concepts, can be used to evaluate and subsequently improve the resilience of a product, project, or service. The benefits of this methodology were demonstrated through its application to the Kenyan tomato value chain as a means of evaluating food security in the context of tomato availability. Through the application of this methodology a comprehensive system model of the Kenyan tomato value chain was created; this model can be used for future researchers and entrepreneurs to better understand how food value chains work in Kenya. The final step of the Qubed Resilience Methodology, the resilience analysis, resulted in specific interventions to be taken to improve the resilience of the Kenyan tomato value chain and improve regional food security. Overall, 100 stakeholder interviews were broken down into 76 stressors and further refined into 17 endogenous variables; through resilience analysis, the 17 variables were used to identify 5 disturbances and 5 drivers of resilience as well as targeted interventions broken down across 3 different scales.