Partnership Inception Workshop by the Mauritius Breadfruit Sector Consortium, 9th-10th February 2012

The Mauritius Breadfruit Sector Consortium organised a two-day Partnership Inception Workshop on 9th-10th February 2012 at the Food and Agricultural Research Council (FARC), Reduit. This workshop is supported and is part of the PAEPARD Project, which is facilitating this collaboration among various stakeholders involved in the Breadfruit Sector in Mauritius, as well as European Partners (African-European Partnership). Stakeholders present at the workshop were from Research institutions, the University of Mauritius, farmer organisations, breadfruit exporters, breadfruit growers, the Ministry of Agro-Industry and Food Security (plant protection and propagation) and the private sector. The workshop was facilitated by two external facilitators who have been selected and trained by PAEPARD.

The overall Objectives of this workshop were for stakeholders to:

Get to know each other
Understand PAEPARD
Appreciate the importance of partnership within the consortium
Understand and apply the value-chain approach
Participate actively in different group activities
Establish a framework for effective partnership

Day 1 – Introduction to PAEPARD and establishment of knowledge base
The first day of the workshop was focused on getting to know about the PAEPARD project, the breadfruit sector consortium and the establishment of a ‘knowledge base’ on breadfruit. Power-Point presentations were delivered by the Facilitators, followed by a Group Activity to establish the knowledge base. In order to facilitate communication, information sharing and discussion among the stakeholders, a wiki has been created for the consortium. One page on the wiki consists of a Google map where a crowd-sourcing experiment is in progress which aims to locate breadfruit trees in Mauritius. During the workshop, a demonstration was done on how the stakeholders present in the workshop can add breadfruit trees to the Google map and encourage other people they know to contribute in this exercise, as the knowledge on where these trees are located across the island may be useful to many partners within the consortium and also for other stakeholders in the breadfruit sector in Mauritius. The Power Point presentations below gives an over-view of the activities that were proposed to the participants on Day 1 of the workshop.

Day 2 – Value-chain approach, roles of the stakeholders and way forward
The theme for Day 2 was on the value-chain Approach, roles of stakeholders and the way forward for the consortium. From Day 1, a lot of information and knowledge were generated. From this activity, it was clear about what we know on breadfruit in Mauritius, which information/knowledge is missing and from these, what are the questions that we are asking ourselves. Activities that followed on Day 2 were based on:

Validating the information that we know (Is the information documented or indigenous knowledge?)
Looking for links between the different components present in the value-chain
Clustering questions that we have at different levels of the value-chain
Locating who are the stakeholders involved at different levels of the value-chain, why are they involved in that specific area and how are they going to contribute in the value chain

By the end of these activities, a lot of information, knowledge, ideas and questions were generated, which would be used for further discussion during the next meetings and the Second Partnership Inception Workshop (for value-chain mapping and analysis). The last session of the workshop involved a plenary discussion on the way forward for the consortium to work as a team.

The workshop was an exhaustive one in the sense that participants had to think and probe a lot to get maximum information that we have and locate where we are, so that we can find a mechanism to collaborate among stakeholders for a common vision.

More details on the consortium Wiki.

The slideshow below are some pictures that were taken during the workshop: