The DeSIRA CONNECT Days Eastern and Southern Africa were held on 29, 30, and 31st of July in Kigali, Rwanda,
The CONNECT Days Eastern and Southern Africa were prepared in close collaboration with FARA and were held during the Science and Partnerships for Agriculture Conference (SPAC 2024).
Purpose of the CONNECT Days
This event aimed to share the lessons learned in the implementation of DeSIRA projects and identified the conditions to continue their innovation trajectories.
To this end, the event offered three types of activities:
- a project fair with individual booths to promote and discuss your projects,
- inter-project thematic workshops to learn together from the implementation of DeSIRA, and
- round tables with other stakeholders aimed at continuing the innovation trajectories of projects.
Each activity was designed to feed into the others.
Key messages and recommendations that came out of the DeSIRA CONNECT Days
- Research is essential to help farming communities tackle the multiple challenges they face. To do so research needs to support new solutions, support communities and co-create new knowledge.
- New knowledge is great, but it needs to be owned by farming communities and it also needs to translate into actionable policies that enable innovation.
- Ensuring ownership and translation into action is best supported by multistakeholder mechanisms that are becoming a new normal for research in agricultural innovation.
- Scaling, out, up, and deep, the multiple outcomes of DeSIRA projects require that these multistakeholder mechanisms are further supported and facilitated. This likely to be better achieved if research and its partners draw from trans-disciplinary approaches. Among these gender and youth should have a key role.
- This means that farming communities design further meaningful solutions in partnership with research, civil society and the private sector.
- It also means that governments and public authorities understand and support this.
- The EU remains committed to supporting the outcomes of the many DeSIRA projects and research partners with further availability of funding which will now be ensured by the upcoming next phase of the initiative called DeSIRA+
