FaReNE writeshop in Mali documents 3 years of experience

The Farmer-led Research Network (FaReNe) project is a joint project of Prolinnova partners in Burkina Faso and Mali with financial support from the McKnight Foundation and technical support from the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT), host of the Prolinnova international secretariat. It looks at how best to organise and use farmer-led innovation approaches, such as Participatory Innovation Development (PID), Local Innovation Support Facility/Fund (LISF) and farmer networking, and how these can contribute to agro-ecological intensification. Approaching the end of the current funding cycle, key members of the partner organisations from the two countries – NGO staff, researchers and farmer organisation representatives – met for a writeshop to document their three years of experiences, share and analyse these together, and work towards well-written papers.

Hosted by ADAF-Gallè, the writeshop took place in Bamako from 30 October to 2 November 2018 with facilitation support by Geneviève Audet-Belanger and Laurens van Veldhuizen of KIT. Participants decided to develop three papers per country, each covering one of the three main components of FaReNE: PID, LISF and farmer networking. During the workshop, participants developed paper outlines, gave and received feedback, developed first draft content in the form of bullet points followed by another round of feedback and finally wrote first drafts of full-text papers. All six papers were compiled in this publication: Le projet FaReNe et l’approche participative : les expériences du Mali et du Burkina Faso. The individual papers can also be found on the Country Platform pages of Burkina Faso and Mali.

The Burkina team arranged translation of their three documents into English:

and now there are also English versions of the three documents by the Mali team: