Given high demand growth for food in West Africa and urbanization intensification, families face regular disruptions in food availability, affordability, and diversity—causing strife. “The Exchange” provides a scalable solution for healthy food systems and sustainable agriculture, including an adaptive information platform, advanced communications, and active community engagement to transform tropical food systems—particularly important to women and youth. In West Africa, agricultural growth can be 11 times more effective in reducing poverty than growth in non-agricultural sectors. Diverse diets containing nutritionally important foods can be obstructed on multiple levels, and climate change destabilizations will only worsen the situation. We bring a collaborative of international and local leaders in Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, and Burkina Faso, to engage in co-production of knowledge and skills. Exchange communities participate in distributed, site-based diagnostics to make informed decisions in the face of limited resources (time, labor, land, water, inputs) and climatic uncertainty.