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ERI AND THE STORY OF A TRANSFORMATION
Published: October 29, 2018
On September 24th, our member organisation Dreikönigsaktion (DKA) held a workshop about the Enabling Rural Innovation Project (ERI) with Tumaini Matutu. Tumaini supports our partner organisation Act Mara in Tanzania as a project coordinator for ERI. During the workshop she gave us some insights about the project, their work and the people behind it.
Our dear colleagues from the communication department, Wolfgang Zechner and Klaus Ebenhöh, were in the lucky position to get together with Tumaini for an interview. They wanted to know more about the philosophy behind ERI:
“Yes, that is our motto, that’s our theme: putting farmers in the driver’s seat. Why are we saying it? Because we don’t do anything for them. We rather do it with them or they do it themselves. So they become the engineers of the development process. The trainers are just co-drivers. This is real empowerment.”, this is how Tumaini gets to the heart of what ERI is all about. If you are interested in reading the full interview, click here and visit the HORIZONT3000-Blog.
The ERI project is an innovative approach developed by HORIZONT3000 and our partner organisations in East Africa as well as universities in East Africa and Vienna. It aims to provide better living conditions for the rural population in East Africa by enabling small scale producers to apply market-oriented and sustainable agriculture. As a result it strengthens food sovereignity and sustainable management of natural resources. The approach consists of five main pillars: Participatory Diagnosis, Participatory Market Research, Farmer Participatory Research, Enterprise Development and Participatory Monitoring & Evaluation. Tumaini explained to us how she trained the farmers on these five different pillars and how they were included and integrated in the implementation of the approach.
The ERI approach has become a significant methodology in our projects in the sector of Rural Development in East Africa. Therefore, we were pleased that our partner organisation Caritas MADDO shared a convincing experience applying the ERI approach with us in the context of the KNOWLYMPICS 2018.
