Amira Bliss, Social Impact Leader

Last week, SGD co-hosted Amira Bliss together with the NYUAD Office of Community Outreach as part of the Social Impact Leader Series. As senior program associate, Mrs. Bliss designs and implements a strategy to catalyze innovation at the Foundation and in the social sector more broadly. She leads the innovation workstream of the Food Waste and Spoilage initiative, aiming to surface and scale innovative solutions to post-harvest food loss affecting the livelihoods of African smallholder farmers. Her lecture came at the perfect time as SGD dedicates this month to learning more about food security.

Mrs. Bliss first described the current trends in food security initiatives around the world. “Imagine if 1/3 of goods never make it to the customers,” she tells us. In fact, this staggering statistic is our current reality due to the broken linkages between farmers and consumers that make the food supply chain inefficient at its best, wasteful at its worst. For example, in Nigeria, where most of her work related to food-security is located, food processing plants built in the northern part of the country have become obsolete because of the lack of road access connecting them to other major cities.



In 2016, The Rockefeller Foundation launched YieldWise, a $130 million initiative, with the goal of demonstrating how the world can halve food loss by 2030, one of the UN’s sustainable development goals. By changing society’s attitudes to food waste as an unacceptable occurrence, the Foundation aims that these will influence food production and distribution strategies in lasting and impactful ways. Mrs. Amira Bliss tells us that a combination of innovative finance tools, supply chain management, and collaboration with local policymakers are key avenues to achieving this goal.

Mrs. Bliss is an engaging speaker who wants to make the lecture as participative as possible, asking as many questions from the audience as much as she receives. During the Q&A session, I asked Mrs. Bliss what her thoughts were regarding unintended negative effects that legislation can have on food security. Although France’s recent ban on throwing away unsold food in supermarkets may initially seem like a good policy shift, is it possible that these also have deleterious effects on the supermarkets’ supply chain? She says yes, laws intended to improve food security can definitely have unintended negative effects, but that different actors in the supply chain respond to the shift accordingly. Going back to her example of Nigerian farmers, she says that unsold cassava in supermarkets become reprocessed into flour that have longer shelf lives. If agents across the supply chain are open to adapting to these constantly changing business environments, there are creative ways to prevent food from being wasted.

For more information about Amira Bliss and the Social Impact Leader Series, please click here.