The ACE4Food co-creation workshop revealed that despite recent increases in investments supporting the circular economy in food systems, the adoption of circularity principles among agri-food sector actors remains relatively low. Many actors have conflicting understanding of circularity, which hinders the formulation of effective policies at national and subnational levels. Additionally, the lack of a unified vision creates uncertainty about the criteria funders use to support circular businesses, with minimal coordination among stakeholders, increasing the risk of duplicated efforts.

Achieving this ambition requires a range of actors and components working together to deliver collective impact in circular food systems. Such impact can only be achieved through a network of communities of practice, composed of individuals, organizations, and institutions who advance a common agenda by learning together, aligning, and coordinating their actions to effect systemic change.

The stakeholder engagement preceding the workshop, along with the co-creation exercises, have defined the current structure and key pillars of the ACE4Food Initiative, recognizing this as an ongoing co-creation and engagement process. The proposed five key pillars and levers address the identified challenges and aim to transition from the current state to the desired future state.

The goal of ACE4Food is to establish an expedited, integrated, and coordinated systems approach to food circularity in East Africa, with potential scalability to other regions on the continent. The core thematic areas include circular economy system leadership and design, food loss and waste, productive use of waste, regenerative agriculture, and the food-energy nexus. Within the workshop's co-creation process, participants also reflected on four levers of change—system leadership, policy and enabling environment, gender and social equity, and finance and markets—to achieve collective impact goals for people (improved livelihoods, food security and nutrition, jobs, increased productivity, incomes, and climate resilience), nature (biodiversity protection, water security), and climate (reduced greenhouse gas emissions).