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.

Quelques participants à l'atelier de lancement de Proli-GEAFaSa / Some participants in the Proli-GEAFaSa inception workshop (Photo:AgriBio Services)

In November 2019, the Prolinnova Oversight Group (POG) approved the application of a multistakeholder group in Zimbabwe to be recognised as a Country Platform (CP) in the Prolinnova Community of Practice.

The group includes people from the network PELUM (Participatory Ecological Land Use Management) Zimbabwe, the NGO Cluster Agriculture Development Services (CADS), the NGO The Phiri Award (named after the renowned farmer innovator in water harvesting and ecological farming, Zephaniah Phiri), the Zimbabwe Smallholder Organic Farmers Forum (ZIMSOFF) and the Centre for Applied Social Sciences (CASS) at the University of Zimbabwe. The host organisation of the CP is PELUM–Zimbabwe; the coordinator is Gertrude Pswarayi-Jabson (pelumzim@gmail.com).

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: