The 7th Africa-Wide Agricultural Extension Week (AAEW 2025) was held in Lilongwe, Malawi, on 12–16 May, co-hosted by the Ministry of Agriculture and the Malawian Forum for Agricultural Advisory Services (MaFAAS). The AAEW is a biennial flagship event of the African Forum for Agricultural Advisory Services (AFAAS), which brings participants from across Africa and globally to deliberate on strategic issues in agricultural extension and advisory services in Africa. The theme of the 2025 event was “Harnessing Agricultural Extension & Advisory Services in Scaling Regenerative Agriculture and Nature-Based Solutions for Food-System Transformation in Africa” and various activities in the AAEW were directed at ways to promote and scale this approach.
The Prolinnova Subregional Coordinator for West & Central Africa (SRC-WCA), Paul Jimmy, attended the event on behalf of the Prolinnova network. This was an opportunity to present Prolinnova’s experiences in promoting local innovation and farmer-led participatory innovation development (PID). He gave an oral presentation entitled: ‘’Entering transdisciplinary research by appreciating local innovation: experience of Prolinnova in the West African Sahel’’. Through this presentation, Paul shared the experiences of the SULCI-FaNS project (Scaling Up Local Capacity to Innovate for Food and Nutrition Security) in Ghana, and the Proli-GEAFaSa project (Promoting local innovation in water management by family farmers in the Sahel) in Burkina Faso and Senegal, especially the PID exercises undertaken and the lessons learned for institutionalising the approach among agricultural research & development organisations. The presentation attracted several questions revealing keen interest in the topic and yielded a fruitful Q&A session.
Other major activities during the AAEW included panel discussions, oral or poster presentations, side events by partner organisations (on Farmer Radio Trust, AGRA etc.), exhibitions by partner organisations and projects, and a field visit to five agricultural centres. Paul visited the ‘’Amari Dairy Cooperative’’ in Chimsikidzi Village, Lilongwe. This cooperative’ was initiated by a group of four women promoting purebred cattle purchased from South Africa. They work together on 25 hectares with a team of men and women employed for cultivating forage crops, producing the animal feed using machinery they own themselves, and marketing the milk produced. They were also using the by-products for vegetable production for home consumption. It’s a very promising women’s cooperative which is an example of a fully integrated production system in the community.
Paul also met and networked with different people especially Sorghum United Foundation and the Digital Participatory Integrated Climate Services for Agriculture (E-PICSA) initiators for exploring potential collaboration in the future. Finally, he held a short meeting with Nigerian participants who were present to assess their interest in reactivating the Prolinnova Platform in their country. They expressed their renewed interest and agreed to seek an opportunity to work together on a project as a means to mobilise the stakeholders and reactivate the Country Platform.
