Day 4 – Thursday 1st December 2011: Designing a partnership facilitation process
The fourth day of the PAEPARD Agricultural Innovation Workshop begun with the feedback from the previous day (positive and negative points) and content reflection from each process monitoring group. Day 4 was going to be about designing a partnership facilitation process and the lead facilitator, Mr. Richard Hawkins introduced the programme of the day to the participants.
Presentation on PAEPARD Inception Workshop – June 2011
The output of the PAEPARD Inception Workshop held in Nairobi from 6th to 10th June 2011 was presented to the participants by Mr. Richad Hawkins. The objective was for participants to have an idea about how an inception workshop was organised by PAEPARD in the past and the points to keep in mind while planning and implementing the workshop. After the presentation, there was a plenary discussion and to answer one of the questions asked by a participant, the facilitator explained that there are 4 steps which are involved for a concept note to become a formal proposal and the example given was from the PAEPARD First Call:
1. Original proposal to PAEPARD
2. Concept Note (Draft)
3. Complete Concept Note
4. Draft Proposal Write-shop to generate formal proposal (submission)
Individual plans
Now that all participants knew about how to conduct an inception workshop and also about the different steps involved in generating a formal proposal from an initial concept note, each country pair was asked to design a timeline of 3 months on the type of activities they will organise with respect to their respective consortium and also the specific output/milestone achieved for each proposed activity. 45 minutes were given for this activity and the output was to be written on a flip-chart and put on the walls. When everyone had completed their timeline, they were asked to have a look at those from other countries and see what was similar or different. Then, those who wanted to add some points to their timeline were given some time to do so.
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| Timeline for Uganda |
Video Projection
The video was about an interview from Mrs. Habiba Hassan Wassef of Egypt, who talked about the interest of Europe in Africa. The points gathered from this were that:
- There are reasons why Europe is interested in Africa. We have many technologies present in Africa, fermented food for example
- Africans should be aware of their Intellectual Property Rights before sharing their views with Europeans
- We should be proud of the role we can play in the world as post-harvest technologists
- The way for us to contribute better is to consider Africa as one and not in different region
After the video projection, Mr. Francois Stepman showed the blog posts on the PAEPARD blog and explained that those who are not present in the Workshop can follow us through the blog.
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| Video Projection |
Financing ARD
To understand about how ARD can be financed, a document from ICRA, which contained key concepts on how to finance ARD were given to the participants, who were asked to read the document. Then there was a brainstorming session to find the possible finance sources at National Level, Sub-Regional Level (Africa) and International Level. Each participant who was suggesting a possible finance source had to give a brief explanation of how the financing is done. This session was quite a long and exhaustive one, after which participants went to have lunch.
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| Finance sources at National, Regional and International level |
Partners from Uganda Consortium
When participants were back in plenary after lunch, two partners from one of the selected consortium in Uganda were present among us in the workshop. They introduced themselves and explained that they are mainly into the production of solanaceous crops. They said that they got to know about PAEPARD and the call from a partner in South Africa who got the information and shared with them. When asked if they think they need an external facilitator trained by PAEPARD, they said that they had suggested the name of a facilitator, but is the one trained by PAEPARD is good, they think that both facilitators can work together.
Presentation by ASARECA
To get a better idea of how ARD are financed in Africa, there was a presentation by Mr. Joseph Methu from ASARECA. He explained about how ASARECA does the coordination work regarding financing of ARD in the East Africa Region. The presentation also included the goal and results of ASARECA, its development partners, programs and support units, granting systems, criteria for selection and typical activities supported. After the presentation, the participants got the opportunity to ask questions on the presentation and on ASARECA.
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| Presentation by ASARECA |
Statements from World Bank
This session was a presentation on a report from the World Bank by Mr. Francois Stepman. From that Report, different statements were taken and presented to the participants as statements 1, 2, 3 and 4. Participants were divided into 3 groups according to where they were sitting and after each statement, the group had to come to a consensus regarding their opinion on the different statements; Totally agree=1, More or less agree=2, Don’t know=3, Don’t really agree=4 and Don’t agree at all=5. If a group was giving an answer, it had to be explained why. when this exercise was over, Mr. Francois Stepman explained about the Terra Viva Grants Directory and how to get useful information on the website.
Proposal formulation
The last session for Day 4 was about the proposal formulation. Participants were given a document on the topic and Mr. Richard Hawkins explained about the points to be taken into consideration while doing a proposal formulation. With this, Day 4 was over a bit earlier than the previous days and process monitoring groups got together and discussed and the positive and negative points of the day, what they have learnt and what can be improved the following day!
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