The BENEFIT-REALISE programme aims to improve food and nutrition security and build resilience of targeted Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) households. The
programme that started in 2018 works with eight Ethiopian universities as implementing partners, spread across four regional states of Ethiopia – one of them Mekelle University Cluster in Tigray.

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. While acknowledging the successes achieved so far this paper also highlights key lesson learned in the implementation process to encourage learning, contributing to knowledge management process to improve further efforts in similar innovations and efforts.