The International Partners Workshop (IPW) took place virtually in early October 2021, the first day being an online marketplace that gave partners in the Country Platforms a chance to share some experiences in promoting local innovation and participatory innovation development (PID) activities in their countries. The IPW focused on two main themes - institutionalisation of the PID approach and regionalisation of the Prolinnova network - and also discussed some issues around how digitalisation might support PID. Invited speaker Million Belay, General Coordinator of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), shared some insights into communication across countries in Africa for advocacy.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the IPW, including the marketplace, to those who facilitated sessions, to those who made presentations, and to the very able translators who assisted with French-English-Portuguese simultaneous interpretation.

The report from the workshop, including all annexes with the presentations, can be found here.

The September 2021 issue of the Appropriate Technology magazine (Vol. 48, No. 3) brings a 2-page article "First innovation fair celebrates farmer ingenuity in Cameroon" written by Abdel-Karim Ali Mahamane, Prolinnova's Subregional Coordinator in West & Central Afrca, and Jean-Bosco Etoa, Prolinnova-Cameroon coordinator. The article highlights the awards given during the fair to young people - male and female - for their innovations in food processing.

Although the NaviNut (Enhancing women’s agency in navigating changing food environments to improve child nutrition in African drylands) project is still relatively young, with the fieldwork having started only in late 2020, several partners presented posters or gave oral presentations at the international Tropentag conference on 15–17 September 2021.

The Tropentag is an interdisciplinary, science-based and development-oriented conference on research in tropical and subtropical agriculture and rural development held annually in Germany, Austria, Belgium or Czechia. This year’s Tropentag, with the theme “Towards shifting paradigms in agriculture for a healthy and sustainable future", in hybrid format, was organised by the Institute of Agricultural Sciences in the Tropics (Hans-Ruthenberg-Institute) at the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart, Germany.

On Friday 1 October, we had our first virtual marketplace for Prolinnova Country Platforms (CPs). It was attended by 42 participants from various CPs, members of the Prolinnova Oversight Group, International Support Group and Friends of Prolinnova. Thank you to all the CPs and the farmer innovators with whom you collaborated in preparing material for the marketplace. We had a range of videos and presentations made by representatives of the CPs, including farmer innovators. It provided a great opportunity to share with and learn from each other. Thanks to A Growing Culture (AGC), who worked over the last couple of months assisting members of CPs to develop materials and story-telling skills.

Fanos Mekonnen Birke has joined the Prolinnova International Support Team. At its May 2021 meeting, the Board of Agrecol Association – the Northern Focal Point of the Prolinnova network – decided that Fanos would be the contact person between Agrecol and Prolinnova. 

She has many years’ experience with Prolinnova, as she facilitated analysis of efforts to integrate the PID approach into agricultural advisory services in Cambodia and Tigray (Northern Ethiopia) and was part of the Prolinnova–Ethiopia network. She holds an MSc in Management of Agroecological Knowledge and Social Change from the University of Wageningen in the Netherlands and recently completed her doctorate in the Department of Communication and Advisory Services in Rural Areas at the University of Hohenheim in southern Germany. Her doctoral research was on “Public agriculture extension and information communication technologies: a case study in South Wollo, Ethiopia”.