On 11 December 2007, the Prolinnova Oversight Group (POG) officially welcomed Prolinnova Mozambique into the international Prolinnova community of practice. The idea for this Country Programme (CP) was born in a workshop organised by VETAID-Mozambique in December 2006, which brought together the main stakeholders in agricultural research and development in the country to share experiences in promoting farmer innovation.
A two-person interim core team from VETAID and another local NGO (ADCR) facilitated planning of inception activities, including training in concepts and methodologies of Participatory innovation Development, identifying and cataloguing farmer innovations, information sharing, awareness raising and policy advocacy, and strengthening the multi-stakeholder platform. The overall aim is to build capacities in Mozambique to practise a more participatory approach in agricultural R&D.
This CP, like the programmes in Kenya, the Andes and francophone West Africa, is not among the original nine CPs receiving core funding from the Netherlands Government. All these new programmes therefore have to pool existing resources of partners in pursuit of a common aim and raise funds for further support needed. Prolinnova Mozambique has the additional task of translating materials from English to Portuguese and vice versa to be able to communicate better with other members in the international network.
At the very time that the POG was deliberating on its inclusion, Prolinnova Mozambique without external funding was holding a coordination meeting of VETAID, ADCR and other partners in the country, to discuss activities implemented in 2007 and to plan further activities in 2008. These will be presented in a new page for Prolinnova Mozambique , which will soon be opened up on this website.
