“Innovation is inevitable for development, whatever domain we talk about.”

Hello, who are you?

I am Drissa Sangare. I am a graduate of rural sociology and economics. I have more than 10 years’ experience in research and development in new value chains, particularly soya and sunflower. The originality of CDAIS lies in its approach of capacity building, specifically regarding functional capacities.

What are your roles and responsibilities as National Innovation Facilitator?

I am an innovation facilitator for the sunflower innovation partnership, involved since 2015. My role is to interact with stakeholders of the partnership at local and national level, to identify their capacity development needs in order to innovate, elaborate action plans, facilitate capacity building, support documentation, and to scale out the innovation.

What has CDAIS changed for you?

Thanks to CDAIS, I have realized that innovation and progress are intertwined. I was focused on capacity building for technical, material or financial skills. Now, I have understood that this approach shows limitations and can have strong consequences on the behaviour of stakeholders implementing development projects. I have been able to influence the attitude of some colleagues of my unit. For example, when the team organizes workshops around the implementation of the soya project, reflexion is now more focused on ways to strengthening producers’ abilities to defend their businesses and obtain support from financial institutions, when before it was more about pre-financing their campaign.