Platform for African – European Partnership in Agricultural Research for Development

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Regional Workshop of African and European Research Area programme managers for agriculture research for development

11-13 Oct 2011 Uganda. ERA-ARD II together with FARA co-organized a workshop of the African and European Research Area programme managers for agriculture research for development (ARD).

The concept was to create a working mechanism for a real demand-driven co-ordination and alignment of joint research and training activities in Sub-Saharan Africa region especially in developing human and institutional capacities.

The aim of the workshops was to identify regional research demand expressed by African ARD stakeholders and to match it with the available resources from the European programs. The workshops established an integrated approach of programming from various sources to contribute to an effective research, training and education in Africa.

The outcome of the workshop are:
  • identification of priority themes that could be supported using available resources from Africa and Europe. A call for proposals will be launched in the following months. Further details are described in the below concept note, "Sub Sahara Africa - Regional ARD-Alliances".
  • experts/stakeholders present their concepts on specific aspects of "Sustainable agricultural intensification through increased productivity and commodity value of crops". 
  • This was followed by an exchange of views with government official delegates and European program managers.
This film is about the RUNetwork question and answer service for farmers in Africa.

It describes how vouchers are used to esablish a constructive dialogue between the farming and the scientific community. It is not just farmers that get answers from science to solve their production problems but also science that gets access to farm level data for a better understanding of the dynamics of local farming systems. Information from farmers about upcoming problems is also used for early warning. The approach was successfuly tested in 5 different countries and scaled up to 14 communities all over Uganda. It is presently introduced in another 15 African countries in a collaborative project between the forum for agricultural research in Africa (FARA) and the ferderal office for agriculture and food (BLE Germany) with financial support from the Afircan development Bank.

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