Bilateral Ethiopian Netherlands Effort for Food Income & Trade
The attached brief presents a summary of major activities, testimonies and lessons learned from BENEFIT-RELALISE Mekelle University Cluster experience in 2019. It highlights activities implemented in crowdsourcing, Participatory Varietal Selection (PVS), validation, demonstration, nutrition, pre-scaling, seed multiplication etc.
We are pleased to share with you, the BENEFIT Partnership Newsletter for the months of October-December 2019. In this issue, we bring you highlights of stories, updates and news from the five BENEFIT Partnership programmes – ISSD, CASCAPE, ENTAG, SBN and REALISE over the last three months.
On December 2, 2019, BENEFIT–PCU organized a half-day workshop on agriculture and nutrition linkages in BENEFIT programmes (ISSD, REALISE, SBN, ENTAG and CaNaG (CASCAPE Nutrition and Gender) to reflect on Nutrition Sensitive Agriculture (NSA) lessons learned and identify key areas of future engagements and research opportunities.
On October 14, 2019, BENEFIT Partnership held a stakeholders’ workshop on future BENEFIT Partnership to validate the relevance of the planned components, get feedback on the content and explore opportunities for better alignment, synergy and future collaboration.
We are pleased to share with you, the BENEFIT Partnership Newsletter for the months of July-September 2019. In this issue, we bring you highlights of stories, updates and news from the five BENEFIT Partnership programmes – ISSD, CASCAPE, ENTAG, SBN and REALISE over the last three months.
A high-level visit took place on September 30, 2019 to BENEFIT (ISSD & REALISE) programme sites in Arsi, Oromia Regional State of Ethiopia. The field visit, organized by The BENEFIT Partnership, was meant to allow visitors to see the dynamics of the progarmmes’ operations and the extent to which the progarmme works with the government, research institutes and other NGOs towards the development of the agriculture sector.
“EXPERIENCE CAPITALIZATION: WORKING TOWARDS ITS INSTITUTIONALIZATION” is a booklet produced by The Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA), on facilitating the adoption of an experience capitalization process in rural development initiatives, The BENEFIT Partnership experience is featured on page 94.
Ethiopia Ministry of Agriculture (MoA), Natural Resources and Food Security Sector, and the Bilateral Ethiopia-Netherlands Effort for Food, Income and Trade (BENEFIT) Partnership signed a MoU to conduct soil classification and mapping for BENEFIT-REALISE pilot woredas. Soil Information and Mapping Directorate under the State Minister of Natural Resources and Food Security will collaborate with BENEFIT partnership (REALISE programme) on preparation and sustainable use of soils and recommendation maps.
Five representatives from different non-governmental organizations were given an assignment to establish a National level network to facilitate engagement of non-governmental organizations in the process for engaging citizens to better produce citizen generated data which could lead to alternative joint report. BENEFIT Partnership was one of the five committee members selected.
A National Gender in Agricultural Mechanization Workshop was organized by the Ethiopian Network for Gender Equality in Agriculture (ENGEA) on 6 – 7 June 2019 at the Radison Blue Hotel in Addis Ababa. The workshop was organized to discuss the national agricultural mechanization strategy and implementation, and share evidence-based research and practices, successes and challenges related to mainstreaming gender in agricultural mechanization.
The recent fast expansion of breweries in Ethiopia is presenting a unique opportunity for malt barley producing farmers in Tigray. To capitalize on this opportunity BENEFIT progrmmes (ISSD, CASCAPE and REALISE) have been working on various interventions to strengthen the malt barley value chain with partners across the board. Accordingly, the Southern Zone Agricultural Coordination office and BENEFIT projects (ISSD, CASCAPE and REALIZE) jointly conducted a consultative workshop to enhance malt barley production and marketing in southern Tigray on May 14, 2019 in Maychew town.
