On behalf of the international Prolinnova network, Do Christophe Ouattara from World Neighbors (WN) Burkina attended a workshop in December 2019 in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, organised by the Global Forum on Agricultural Research and Innovation (GFAR).

This marked the start of a “Collective Action” (CA) bringing together farmer organisations and other stakeholders to develop an inclusive form of research governance that recognises family farmers and rural communities as central agents in agricultural innovation. The Ouagadougou workshop was financed by the McKnight Foundation, which also funds the Prolinnova project “Farmer-led Research Networks” (FaReNe) in Burkina Faso and Mali.

Participants in the SULCI-FaNS inception workshop in Centre Mampuya, Senegal (Photo: Urban Fraefel)

Two new Prolinnova projects have been approved by the German development-support organisation Misereor / KZE (Katholische Zentralstelle e.V. / Catholic Central Agency for Development Aid) - namely, SULCI-FaNs (Scaling Up Local Capacity to Innovate for Food and Nutrition Security) in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ghana and Kenya; and Proli-GEAFaSa  (Promouvoir l'innovation locale dans la Gestion de l'Eau en Agriculture Familiale au Sahel / Promoting local innovation in water management in family farming in the Sahel) in Burkina Faso and Senegal.

Neina Naginpoan, a female small-scale farmer in northern Ghana, did her own experimentation with a local dish “wasawasa”, traditionally made from steamed yam flour, and made it instead from maize flour and powder from the yellow pulp of the dawadawa (Parkia biglobosa) fruit. She sells the food to schoolchildren and on the local market. Neina and some neighbouring women worked together with a female nutrition expert from the University of Development Studies (UDS) in Tamale and a female expert in Women in Agricultural Development and a male extension officer from the Yendi Municipal Department of Agriculture to experiment with different variations on her innovation. They sought to overcome difficulties of scarcity of dawadawa at certain times of the year and to improve the nutritional value of the dish. This 10-page report describes the process of participatory innovation development (PID) on the local food innovation.

Award ceremony in Kassel - the man on the left, Christian Huelsebusch, made for Ann the statue of a Fulani woman with cow

Our heartiest congratulations to Ann!!

Ann Waters-Bayer, a co-founder of Prolinnova and a longstanding and indefatigable member of the International Support Team, received a lifetime achievement award from the German Council for Tropical and Subtropical Agricultural Research. She received the award at a ceremony during the Tropentag 2019 held at the University of Kassel, Germany, on 18 September 2019.

Brigitte Kaufmann, Director of Research at the German Institute for Tropical and Subtropical Agriculture (DITSL), University of Kassel, gave the laudation at the award ceremony as follows:

The third year of the Proli-FaNS (Promoting local innovation in Food and Nutrition Security) project is nearing its completion, which will be end of July 2019. The progress report for the period January–April 2019 gives a concise overview of what the project has accomplished in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ghana and Kenya. This includes the field activities in supporting farmer-led research, documentation of local innovation and joint experimentation processes, and policy dialogue toward institutionalisation of Prolinnova's approach to agricultural research and development to improve food and nutrition security. See the report here.