This year, Humidtropics has planned various activities for the implementation of the Program in the selected Action Sites of West Africa. Cote d’Ivoire, being one of the Action Sites, received the visit of the Humidtropics West Africa Flagship team in June 2014 to assess the opportunity and possibilities of launching the Cote d’Ivoire Action Site. Especially, we sought to meet potential Humidtropics partners and visited sites where the Program could start its activities, building on activities already put in place by existing partners. The scoping visit was held in two stages, the first involving a meeting with potential partners in Abidjan, and the second being a field visit to Soubre Department to see the activities carried out by ICRAF for the project Vision for Change.
The meeting held in Abidjan gave us the opportunity to meet some representatives from the universities, national and international research centers, NGOs, private sector and Government in Cote d’Ivoire involved in rural development activities. I introduced Humidtropics to the potential partners and explained that the Program aims at gathering partners to help close the gap between the ecological and human potentials, and the low livelihood standards of targeted populations in the humid tropics region using an integrated systems approach that looks at the improvement of all the components of rural development.
The Humidtropics team during the field visit to Soubre Department, Cote D’Ivoire.
As mentioned above, the visit to Soubre Department was undertaken to see the activities implemented by ICRAF for the project Vision for Change, which begun in May 2011 and is funded by Mars Inc., the chocolate company. The project’s objective is to tackle the main constraints of cocoa production systems in Cote d’Ivoire, which are aging plantations, high pests pressure and unavailability of forest reserves in the area to create new plantations. The project uses an integrated systems approach to improve the productivity of the cocoa plantations, diversify sources of income, and at the same time contribute to community development.
With the ICRAF project already in existence alongside various capacity building programs, Humidtropics therefore foresees a collaboration of both institutions, which would help to improve the livelihoods of smallholder farmers in the region. Humidtropics, together with other partners in the region can contribute to activities already started by the Vision for Change project by addressing key areas such as nutrition, natural resources management, diversification of cocoa production systems, gender and others.
An experiment site on cocoa plantation rehabilitation in Cote D’Ivoire.
The Humidtropics inception workshop for the Cote d’Ivoire Action Site is scheduled to take place this week. The boundaries of the Action Site as well as its Field Sites will be delineated, and the constraints and challenges of the agricultural sector identified along with propositions for levels of entry for systems improvement. The areas of collaboration between Humidtropics, Vision for Change and others projects will also be discussed and agreed upon.
Blog and photos by Latifou Idrissou, West Africa Flagship Manager, Humidtropics.