As a partnership, the GFSP welcomes and encourages broad participation and involvement. The Advisory Working Groups are made up of key partners and technical experts from relevant industry, public sector and academic institutions, who volunteer their time to offer guidance and direction on specific aspects of GFSP’s activities.

The GFSP Working Groups:

The Food Safety Technical Working Group (FSTWG):
The FSTWG advises on the establishment and coordination of a comprehensive and contextually appropriate suite of food safety training material, resources and competencies. These would be available as open source content, under creative commons licensing, and would be based on agreed international standards, specifications and best practices. There are five Expert Working Groups (EWG) within the FSTWG on specific issues and subject matter areas. The EWGs are Needs Assessment EWG, Regulation EWG, Primary Production EWG, Processing/Manufacturing EWG, and Lab Capacity EWG. It is optional for FSTWG members to join a EWG.

The Monitoring and Evaluation Working Group (MEWG):
The MEWG advises on the design and ongoing implementation of a monitoring and evaluation system to evaluate the GFSP in order to inform further evidence-based decision-making, allocate resources and set priorities.

The Knowledge and Learning Systems Working Group (KLSWG):
The KLSWG is developing recommendations for the design and implementation of open solutions to support the work of the GFSP. This includes collecting needs assessments and use-cases across target audiences in target countries; collecting research to understand the factors in the adoption of food safety behaviors; creating a landscape of current providers; and analyzing potential business models for open source and open content approaches.

The Communications Working Group (CWG):
The CWG advises on and works towards a coordinated and continuously updated communications strategy, including a mobilization strategy for outreach to key stakeholders, promotion of GFSP programs and activities, links with other key partners and publicly-accessibly information describing the GFSP and MDTF’s goals and successes.

The WGs meet on average 3-4 times a year, physically or virtually, with one physical meeting to correspond with the Annual GFSP Conference. Time commitment is about one week a year, depends on level of engagement.

For additional information, please visit www.gfsp.org or contact us at gfsp@worldbank.org