“Knowledge and skill sharing can change the attitude and behaviour of people”

Hello, who are you?

I am Tegegne Wakoya and have been a national Innovation facilitator for the Community based seed production niche in Butajira, Southern Nation Nationality Peoples Region (SNNPR), Ethiopia. I am a rural development practitioner with experience in project coordinating for building resilience of smallholder farmers and emergency relief and integrated rural development projects where I coordinated activities for women through the establishment of rural saving and credit cooperatives. Activities focused on off-farm and on-farm activities but also included access to potable water, health and sanitation, and different activities of crop productions which improved food and livelihood security of poor smallholder farmers. I have also served as Gender and HIV/AIDS coordinator where I had the task of supporting people with HIV to engage in income generating activities. In all of the projects I managed, the livelihood of the youth, women and men has improved as a result of the better income they secured from engaging in improved agricultural practices or off-farm businesses through market and value chine improvement.

What are your roles and responsibilities as National Innovation Facilitator?

My responsibility is as a facilitator of the community based seed production niche through performing a capacity need assessment, developing a coaching plan with partners, facilitating coaching plan validation workshop, organizing review and refinement workshops, recording progress markers and documenting stories of success and lessons learnt, and participating in other activities of CDAIS assigned by the country project manager.

What has CDAIS changed for you?

I have been involved in this project from the very beginning. I received training in how to carry out baseline capacity need assessment, coaching plan development and review and refinement workshops. The issues of my niche was seed marketing, and to solve this problem requires policy changes. At the beginning partners said this issue could not be solved by regional policy makers, but they then understood that they had the capacity of solving the issues of seed marketing and started working together by task sharing, and now we are on the right track to solve issues of seed marketing problem.