Internal consultation of PAEPARD-EAFF

The 25 participants at the Glory Hotel Nairobi, Kenya

15 October. Nairobi. EAFF organised an internal PAEPARD consultation to develop a consensus on challenges and opportunities in Africa Agriculture.  A consensus mechanism was developed so that prioritizing on issues was participatory. 


Objectives of the meeting:

1. A common understanding of the PAEPARD project and a definition of the related expectations by each stakeholder category of actors.
2. For each stakeholder, a review of partnerships experiences with research and other ARD stakeholders.
3. Identification of Interesting case studies of multi-stakeholder ARD and non research partnerships.
4. A review and amendment of the partnership guidelines elaborated by the Working Group of WP5 and recommendations aiming at taking into account the experience of each stakeholder category.
5. Identification of capacity strengthening needs for each stakeholders category and review of the capacity strengthening expertise among the stakeholders to be put at the disposal of the  WP4
6. Identification of concrete innovation challenges in production, NRM, markets access (value chains) around which the stakeholder category would like to work with others.
7. Provide WP3 with information regarding each stakeholder category’s information needs for media and timing;
8. Review the communication strategy.

An analysis of questionnaires was presented by Marygoretti Kamau of EAFF; which mainly focused on findings from the internal consultations and showed clearly the organizations that were interested in participating in PAEPARD project. 

Presentation of case studies from NUCAFE, EAFF, ASARECA, RUFORUM :

• The National Union of Coffee Agribusiness and Farm Enterprises (NUCAFE) is an umbrella association of coffee farmers of Uganda. It has positioned itself in empowering coffee farmers in the Coffee Value chain. It works in partnerships with various organizations and among them is IFPRI in a project aimed at improving the lives of small holder farmers by determining how to strengthen the ability of rural producer organizations to provide market access to their members. 
• Eastern Africa Farmers Federation (EAFF)works with a multiple of partners and the most successful was the CAADP process in Africa. EAFF took the lead role in Youth in Agriculture. EAFF was meant to find out how actively the youth can be involved in agricultural activities. EAFF and other group leaders developed a profiling questionnaire for their commodities. There were however no significant responses from the respondents on all the issues/commodities questionnaires.  
• ASARECA's presentation focused on financing methods and accountability in a multistakeholder projects  
• RUFORUM is an African Initiative managed locally.It obtained funding on training and research programmes to strengthen its member institutions, their structures and mechanism. 

An assessment made on selected African-European partnerships in ARD indicate that stakeholders:

• Lack information on knowledge on funding opportunities, difficulties in finding adequate partners, as well as full understanding of the complex and elaborate mechanisms of fund raising;
• Concentration of partnerships on only two institutional categories of actors (universities and national research institutes), with very limited participation from private 
• EC funded coordination mechanisms are not maximizing their role in facilitating interaction between different stakeholders; 
• European institutes who are more familiar with the EC mechanisms are the initiators of the partnerships and tend to be the coordinators of EC-funded projects; 
• dissemination of innovations is valued least amongst the outcomes of research partnerships as compared to publications, training and access to funding; 
• and the EC instruments that support ARD are difficult to acces by African partners, and their administrative and financial rules are difficult to follow.