News from Prolinnova in the era of Covid-19 / Des nouvelles du Prolinnova à l’ère du Covid-19

UK 1st Prolinnova Country Platform in Global North !

During the virtual meeting of the Prolinnova Oversight Group (POG) on 8 April 2020, a new Country Platform (CP) was welcomed into our Community of Practice. The CP in the UK is the first one in the Global North. It consists of the Farmer-Led Innovation Network (FLIN), currently active in England, Scotland and Wales. The coordinator Lisa Williams van Dijk of the Royal Agricultural University (RAU) already presented FLIN by Skype during the International Partners Workshop (IPW) in Senegal in May 2019, so some Prolinnova partners are already familiar with it.

FLIN brings together over 20 organisations that are promoting farmer-led participatory research and innovation in the UK. They joined forces to share best practices with this approach; to build capacity of existing and new organisations to support farmer-led innovation and research initiatives; to motivate scientists, agricultural advisors and farmers to interact in such initiatives; and to develop collaborative projects/programmes in the UK and internationally.

Farmer innovators are happy people... impressions from a field visit to Kenya

In September 2019, Chesha Wettasinha, a member of the Prolinnova International Support Team was in Kenya on a field visit. She was inspired by the farmer innovators she met and how they are making positive change in their communities. Read her account here.

Vacancy: Subregional coordinator in Eastern & Southern Africa

Prolinnova is seeking a new coordinator (part-time) in Eastern & Southern Africa (ESA). The key responsibility is to coordinate the setting up and operation of the ESA subregional platform for mutual learning and joint action in promoting local innovation and farmer-led participatory research and development, particularly within institutions of agricultural research, advisory services and higher education.

      The Subregional Coordinator (SRC) will work with a taskforce that represents the various Prolinnova Country Platforms in ESA. S/he will also work together with Abdel Ali Mahamane, the SRC for West & Central Africa, to coordinate mutual learning, South–South mentoring and policy dialogue at subregional and regional level.

New Subregional Coordinator in West & Central Africa! / Nouveau coordinateur sous-régional en Afrique occidentale et centrale !


Abdel-Karim Ali Mahamane is the new Prolinnova Subregional Coordinator (SRC) for West & Central Africa as of 1 April 2020. His position is paid out of two projects funded through Misereor/KZE (Catholic Central Agency for Development Aid) in Germany: SULCI-FaNS (Scaling Up Local Capacity to Innovate in Food and Nutrition Security) and Proli-GEAFaSa (Promoting local innovation in water management in family farming in the Sahel) He will be coordinating the subregional activities of the Country Platforms (CPs) in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ghana, Mali and Senegal – and possibly of future CPs that form themselves. He is successor to Georges Djohy, who has been SRC since May 2017 and has taken on a new position in research.

Welcome to Prolinnova–South India !


The Prolinnova Oversight Group (POG) has approved the proposal of a multistakeholder group in Kerala State in South India to be recognised as a “Country Platform” (CP) within the Prolinnova Community of Practice. In large countries with diverse conditions and/or social groups, a CP can be started at state level. The group in Kerala wants to start as Prolinnova–South India and hopes to expand over time to other parts of India.

PID training for SULCI-FaNS anglophone partners

A key activity in the “Scaling Up Local Capacity to Innovate for Food and Nutrition Security” (SULCI-FaNS) project’s calendar for 2020 was a training in Participatory Innovation Development (PID) for partners from francophone and anglophone countries, namely Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ghana and Kenya. This project is a follow-on to the “Promoting local innovation for Food and Nutrition Security” (Proli-FaNS) project that was implemented in the period 2016–19 in these countries.

Joint learning through documentation of farmer–scientist collaboration

An important role of the Prolinnova network is facilitation of joint learning through analysis and documentation of the experiences made, thereby identifying good practice but also recognising weaknesses and room for improvement.

GFAR workshop on supporting co-innovation in family farming / Atelier du GFAR sur l'appui à la co-innovation dans l'agriculture familiale

On behalf of the international Prolinnova network, Do Christophe Ouattara from World Neighbors (WN) Burkina attended a workshop in December 2019 in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, organised by the Global Forum on Agricultural Research and Innovation (GFAR).

This marked the start of a “Collective Action” (CA) bringing together farmer organisations and other stakeholders to develop an inclusive form of research governance that recognises family farmers and rural communities as central agents in agricultural innovation. The Ouagadougou workshop was financed by the McKnight Foundation, which also funds the Prolinnova project “Farmer-led Research Networks” (FaReNe) in Burkina Faso and Mali.

Farewell to Amanuel, founder of Prolinnova–Ethiopia

Amanuel Assefa Ezezu, 1960-2019 (credit: Chesha Wettasinha)

The Prolinnova network mourns the unexpected death of Amanuel Assefa Ezezu in December 2019 in Addis Ababa.

Amanuel played an important role in the Prolinnova network from very early on. While he was working with the NGO AgriService Ethiopia (ASE), he was a driving force behind setting up the Prolinnova multistakeholder platform in his country, which he initially gave the acronym PROFIEET (Promoting Farmer Innovation and Experimentation in Ethiopia), and he was the founding coordinator of the platform. He and his colleagues in PROFIEET hosted our first International Partners Workshop (IPW), which was held in Yirgalem in southern Ethiopia in March 2004.

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