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PlaSA Colombia

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PlaSA Colombia, spanish acronym for Plataforma de Sistemas Alimentarios (Food Systems Platform) is an initiative led by the Alliance Bioversity – CIAT, funded by CGIAR initiative: National Policies and Strategies (NPS), to report, monitor and analyze what is happening in Colombia’s food systems. This platform is an online tool that synthesizes and democratizes data and information, currently dispersed, helping in decision-making, legislation on food safety and to articulate actions from different actors.

It's an easily accessible space in which anyone interested in the complex universe of the food system will find from data to narratives based on truthful, simple, and updated information to better understand dynamics, drivers, main components and trade-offs of the country's food systems.

So far (Jul,2024),  PlaSA has 13 interactive dashboards with information on:

  • Food supply and food miles
  • Environmental impact of food mobilization
  • Evolution of food supply and food miles
  • Municipal comparison: food supply and food miles
  • Food mobilization: routes and travel by type of vehicle
  • Cost and affordability of a healthy, nutritious, and subsistence diet in Cali
  • Distribution of livestock in Colombia
  • Food production and financing
  • Affordability of a healthy, nutritious, and subsistence diet
  • Nutritional status of the Colombian population according to BMI
  • Valle del Cauca (CAVASA) food supply system
  • Public policies related to agrifood systems
  • Food consumption habits in 9 of the country's capital cities

 

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In what context is this tool useful?

PlaSA provides detailed information related to the country’s food system to support decision making (especially for those who formulate policies and design public and private intervention and development programs); to provoke necessary debates on the type of food system to be pursued at both the national and regional levels; and to generate impact on public policies and intervention programs. The organization of the information seeks to structure data from multiple dimensions to facilitate the understanding and construction of narratives by users of any type. This is largely based on secondary data from public sources, processing and translating the complexity of the raw data into simple images. One of the main findings, for example, are the information gaps. These become an invitation to the scientific community to articulate and mobilize academic lenses to the food challenges.

PlaSA Colombia as a digital tool will improve evidence-based decision making by food system actors to mitigate threats and risks. This, in turn, will improve the integration of food system actors, reduce information asymmetries and existing inefficiencies and contribute to the long term, to greater food and nutrition security resulting from decisions and intervention programs based on evidence and updated data. PlaSA Colombia will allow for a constant updating of data and will also reinforce the precision of the intervention of political actors.

Results Achieved

Since the launch of PlaSA Colombia in April 2023, this online platform has been consulted by 2.300 users (Google analytics, 2024) and there is evidence on its use by students, universities, public media, development agencies, public officials, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and others to consult data that provides a comprehensive overview of the country's food systems, as well as to generate information documents such as degree theses, analysis reports, studies, case studies, blogs, and news that puts food systems issues on the public agenda. It can also support the formulation of development programs, interventions, and project activities.

For more information consult: https://hdl.handle.net/10568/141763

National launch of the PlaSA Colombia platform (Spanish)

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Aliados en la implementación:

CAVASA

Banco de la República de Colombia

Pontificia Universidad Javeriana Cali

Universidad de los Andes

Universidad Icesi

Corporación para el desarrollo del Valle del Cauca (Corpovalle)

Universidad EAFIT

Agrosavia

Universidad Autónoma de Occidente

Universidad de la Salle

Universidad Nacional Abierta y a Distancia

Para conocer más sobre el rol de estos aliados de clic aquí