Why a systems approach?

A food system is not limited to agricultural production. It includes the actors, activities, resources and institutions involved in producing, processing, transporting, marketing, preparing, consuming and disposing of food, together with their environmental, nutritional, social and economic outcomes.

In African contexts, a rigorous analysis must remain attentive to territorial diversity, formal and informal markets, infrastructure constraints, linguistic plurality, local knowledge, changing climates and questions of data sovereignty. Metraltus treats these dimensions as part of the research object rather than as background variables.

Research orientation

• Represent: develop explicit vocabularies and ontologies for products, practices, territories, qualities and evidence.
• Connect: organise heterogeneous sources through knowledge graphs while preserving provenance and uncertainty.
• Observe: combine field knowledge, documentary evidence, geospatial information and sensor data when they are available and ethically usable.
• Evaluate: distinguish conceptual models, prototypes, field observations and validated results.
• Govern: design transparent, contestable and locally accountable uses of artificial intelligence.

From knowledge to public value

The objective is not to impose a universal digital model. It is to create interoperable tools that can make knowledge more intelligible, support traceability and certification, and improve the evaluation of food-system transformations without erasing local categories or institutional realities.

Current status: this page presents a research framework. It does not claim that all proposed instruments have already been deployed or validated in the field.