During the week of 21-25 March, a BvAT mission led by the Executive Director, Dr David Amudavi and the EOA-I Continental Secretariat Coordinator, Alex Mutungi undertook a successful monitoring of the Ecological Organic Agriculture (EOA) initiative in Senegal. Senegal is one of the nine countries under BvAT’s coordination on this initiative, which is financed by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. The EOA project in Senegal is implemented by a consortium of 4 partners; CNCR | Conseil national de concertation et de cooperation as the Country Lead Organization (CLO), IED Afrique responsible for Information Communication and Extension Pillar, Agrecole Afrique handling the Value Chain Market Development Pillar and Enda Pronat responsible for Research and Applied Knowledge pillar. The team visited each of the partners separately and had a final joint meeting with all the partners. The BvAT team also visited some of the partners implementing EOA and/ agroecology including Agro-Bio Services and FENAB.
The EOA consortium partners are spread across the capital Dakar and Thies in Senegal. The mission is coming after a period of two years without any physical visits and interaction with any of the partners due to the challenge by Covid-19 pandemic. Partner project monitoring is undertaken for purposes of ensuring project implementation remains on course by identifying challenges, risks and setbacks that partners could be facing and jointly exploring ways of addressing them.
Additionally, such missions serve as opportunities to identify capacity gaps and thus enable putting measures in place to continuously keep building the capacity of partners in areas of technical and financial project management.
The team noted that EOA implementation in Senegal is facing some challenges but was pleased that agroecology is gaining momentum in line with the United Nations Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) aspirations for global food systems transformation to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. Dr. Amudavi singled out a 25-member network called Ecosab that has developed EOA indicators in collaboration with FiBL to monitor the development of EOA in Senegal through data collection and analysis.
Some of the indicators are: Number of farmers trained, area size of land under EOA coverage, diversity of products produced, number of kilograms produced per hectare, number of women and men trained on EOA. He added that this is very much in line with what the African Union led EOA-Initiative is working on to have EOA indicators included within the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) Biennial Review (BR) framework. The BR framework is a continental score card showing how AU member states are performing against the Malabo Commitments. Senegal is expected to contribute to the process of implementing and documenting progress of EOA in the country.
During the joint closure meeting that brought the consortium partners together, Ibrahima Seck (National Steering Committee Vice Chairperson and the National Coordinator of FENAB) called upon the other partners to use the EOA-I platform as a policy advocacy instrument as it’s the only continental outfit that is present in 9 EOA participating countries and with potential to spread to all 55 countries.
In his speech, the Ministry of Agriculture representative, Mr. Philip Korea, holding brief for the Chair of the NSC Dr. Saliou Ngom urged all the partners to unite with the ministry to transform agricultural systems in Senegal. The two officials underscored the need for both the emerging Dynamic for an Agro-Ecological Transition in Senegal (DyTAES) and the EOA-I platform-both platforms should create synergies and work together (sort out leadership wrangles and engage meaningfully) and bring on board all key stakeholders, men and women, youth, grassroot organizations, consumers, civil society organizations, and the Ministry of Agriculture.
The Coordinator of CNCR, Mr. El Hadji Thierno CISSE thanked the BvAT team for visiting them and promised to work with all the partners to ensure recommendations made by the mission are implemented. He called for closer collaboration and communication with BvAT. He was also encouraged by how BvAT is coordinating the Knowledge Hub for Eastern Africa, which is under the Knowledge Centre for Organic Agriculture, a complementary initiative to EOA supported by The Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and coordinated by GIZ.
Dr. Amudavi underscored the need for the partners to work as a team, learning from each other and bringing on board other stakeholders that may not be running projects funded by the initiative.
Compiled by:
Dr David Amudavi & Alex Mutungi