EU-Africa Research and Innovation Partnership on Food and Nutrition Security & Sustainable Agriculture (FNSSA)”

27th June 2017
by secretary

Agrinatura News

7 June 2017 (PM)
Maison de la Région Occitanie, Brussels

Agrinatura members (SLU, CULS, BOKU, UoG, CIRAD, WUR) participated at the meeting in Brussels which was organised at the initiative of Cirad/WUR/FARA back to back with the European Development Days 2017. The main focus was to engage a discussion about the H2020-SC2 draft topic “Support to the implementation of EU-Africa Research and Innovation Partnership on Food and Nutrition Security & Sustainable Agriculture (FNSSA)”, and to decide about the next steps for the development of a proposal.

Main points discussed included:

1. mapping of relevant initiatives
2.            Impact assessment: some sort of ex-post assessment informing the development of indicators for future initiatives that would help to ensure a culture of impact orientation.
3.            Monitoring & Evaluation.
4.            Capacity strengthening: the type of skills and approaches needed in future initiatives and that this could be used to guide curricula and teaching methods. Institutional capacity development was mentioned; especially, the capacity to engage in partnerships.
5. activities including the identification of research gaps, foresight, alignment of funding mechanisms, strategic thinking.
6.            Project management

Potential partners who were present at the meeting were asked to indicate initial interest in the above topics. Several Agrinatura members were present, mainly those involved in the earlier ProIntensAfrica project as SLU, CULS, BOKU, UoG, CIRAD, WUR…

Philippe Petithuguenin introduces the note by pinpointing to one of the conclusions of the final IntensAfrica conference co-organised with the AU in Addis in March 2017 (see annex 2). There is currently a “missing middle” between the HLPD Bureau (and its FNSSA Working group) and the portfolio of projects and initiatives which could contribute to the FNSSA roadmap. This could be solved by facilitating the emergence of “Joint Programming like” instrument for alignment of R&I programming and R&I funding by European and African institutions and for specific research and innovation agenda setting. The establishment of such an intermediate body between the HLPD Bureau (Policy level) and the operational level (projects) matches the requirements of the CSA whose aim is to create a ‘platform for exchange of information between different projects and look for synergies between different funding mechanisms implementing the FNSSA’ (ref: ‘specific challenge’ of the CSA topic description).

The minutes from the meeting you can find here and Annexes here: Annex 3 Coordination and Support Action, annex 2 PPTProIA-Slides

More info here: https://www.eudevdays.eu/sessions/reinforcing-africa-eu-research-and-innovation-collaboration-development-impact

EU-Africa Research and Innovation Partnership on Food and Nutrition Security & Sustainable Agriculture (FNSSA)”

Share

You might also like