The 4th AFAAS Africa-Wide Agricultural Extension Week (AAEW) will be held in Abidjan (Cote d’Ivoire) with a focus on building synergies between Public and Private Sector Agricultural Extension and Advisory Services (AEAS) for Sustainable Agricultural Development in Africa. The event will be embedded in the Agricultural and Animal Resources Fair (SARA).
The conference is contextualised within the backdrop of the growing transformative efforts at national, regional, continental and international levels to make agriculture in Africa more productive, profitable and sustainable. This transformation is expected to lead to an environmentally sustainable increase in technical and economic performance of agricultural value chains and this necessitates a paradigm and operational shift from farming for subsistence to farming as a business i.e. sustainable wealth creation and development. Agricultural Extension and Advisory Services (AEAS) and Private sector, amongst other actors, have key roles to play for the achievement of this transformation.
The potential added-value and mutual benefits of enhanced synergies between Private sector and AEAS are huge, and necessary for achieving sustainable agricultural development. However, in most countries in Africa, the collaboration between AEAS and private sector is still weak, erratic and more often informal, and where there is collaboration, this happens within a frameworks of projects. The 4th AAEW intends to contribute to filling this gap and explore efficient strategies and modalities for fostering and harnessing synergies between AEAS and private sector in the framework of agricultural transformation.
For Information download: Africa-wide Agricultural Extension Week 2019 – Announcement Sept- 2019-.pdf