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During the last week of June, 6 staff from the Centre d’Innovations Vertes pour le secteur Agro-alimentaire from AfricaRice (CIVA) organised a week-long training event in Bohicon, Benin.

42 people from all over the country attended the training in order to become service providers within a project that has 3 objectives:

1. To make agricultural innovations available to rural farming communities
2. To train then employ young, unemployed persons to work within the rural communities and transfer innovations knowledge and know-how 
3. To work with the country’s agricultural colleges to provide the young people’s training and improve colleges’ access to innovations and training material

The project therefore aims to form and to employ young people who shall provide different services to rural communities and who shall in the process become able to plan and run their own rural enterprises.

They get paid for the services they provide, which is a more flexible and efficient approach than to pay fixed salaries. Different service providers can be hired for different tasks for which the providers get paid when the task is completed satisfactorily. Management of the services is done by the RUN system (view The RUN business model).

Through the services provided by young people in the rural communities, the project will collect data from the level of small scale farmers and will identify agricultural best practice as well as opportunities for innovations. This leads to defining other services answering farmers’ needs, based on their demands, such as training courses and technology transfers from research to farmers in order to help them improve their livelihoods through increased income and food security.

Furthermore the project will in this way improve the interaction between farmers and researchers, and the close interaction between farmers, experts and researchers will ensure that provide solutions and improvements which meet directly the farmers’ needs.

The 43 people trained are one of the first batches of service providers who will allow the project to collaborate with 266 farmer groups from 173 arrondissement (sub-division of a local council / tertiary administrative units) in 16 communes (local council) across the entire nation, covering between 1/3 and ½ of the country. In each arrondissement, young service providers will work with groups of farmers, and over the lifetime of the project, it is estimated that 50,000 farming families will be reached.

The training included hands-on session on computers, discussions and field visits to test innovations, data collection tools and procedures. The trainees’ feedback from the Bohicon session was overwhelmingly positive, with comments such as “the training corresponds well to the reality of the field” (Isabelle Lissava), “Total mastery of the various parameters of  the training”(Donan G E Kossou) and “This training has reinforced markedly my ability to collect data” (Casimir O D Guidigan). They were issued with a certificate from the trainers.

This project is one of 3 funded by the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and run by AfricaRice within the Centre d’Innovations Vertes pour l’Agriculture (CIVA), and are part of the BMZ initiative called SEWoH: “One World – No Hunger”, which includes CIVA and other German funded projects.