Keeping up with its tradition, IFAD’s Near East, North Africa and Europe Division (NEN) held its 2010 annual learning retreat from 3-5 November in the Italian Region of Tuscany. Taysir Al-Ghanem reports on this learning event.

The retreat was hosted by two Italian Local Action Groups – GAL Far Maremma and GAL Leader Siena. Through field visits to rural development projects in Tuscany, many operating under the EU LEADER+ (Liaison Entre Actions de Développement Rural) cofinancing programmes, participants sought to acquire greater knowledge on three operational themes - Territorial Development, Rural Finance and the Slow Food Movement.

The learning visits were spent almost exclusively in the field observing on-the-ground demonstrations that apply these three themes. It involved a great deal of interaction with local, regional and provincial authorities. This provided an opportunity for participants to share experiences with respect to issues such as participatory and bottom-up approaches, administrative and financial decentralization, competition in the allocation of resources, monitoring and evaluation etc., and draw on concrete experiences in Italy.

There was a great deal of affinity with Italy with regard to key objectives and strategic partnerships. The projects visited in the field covered a wide spectrum of issues ­from economic and financial growth, through agricultural (milk, chestnuts, etc.) and non-farm (agritourism) activities, to social (nursery, library) and environmental (conservation agriculture, biodiversity) objectives. The visits demonstrated the benefits of private-public partnerships, as well as the challenges of multi-sectoral planning and execution.

The three-day retreat also aimed to review and finalize NEN’s 2011 Divisional Plans. Participants reflected on the division’s operational policies, on-going activities and pipeline interventions, and shared lessons learned to acquire knowledge in areas relevant to its mandate.

Reflecting on the division’s 2010 achievements, and distilling lessons learned from performance bottlenecks and constraints, NEN staff took the opportunity to acquire more “know-hows” relevant to their sphere of work. They were joined by three international consultants, four guests from IFAD’s Arab Gulf States Liaison Office (AGL), one guest from the Environment and Climate Change Division (ECD), and a guest from the Mountain Areas Development Agency (MADA) in Albania.

Each NEN staff member selected a theme in relation to NEN’s operational work plans, gathered information and reported on the take-away lessons from the visits, discussions, and presentations from the learning event. The contributions were subsequently generated into this Knowledge product – the present ‘Learning new approaches to rural development’ website. Individual participant contributions can be found under the following themes:

 

1. Territorial development
• ‘Importance of Partnership and Cooperation in territorial development’ by Abdelaziz Merzouk
• ‘Product traceability down to the producer and farmer level’ by Abdelhamid Abdouli
• ‘Moving towards a territorial development approach in the framework of IFAD-financed programmes in Albania’ by Lorenzo Coppola
• ‘Decentralization and poverty reduction’ by Nadim Khouri
• ‘A comparative analysis of territorial development and community-driven development’ by Rasha Omar
• ‘Siele Mercury Mine visit’ by Julie Danskin
• ‘Opportunities for economies in transition’ by Abdelkarim Sma
• ‘Optimizing the milk production chain- GAL Maremma’ by Mikael Kauttu
• ‘Territorial development approach and methodology: Participatory and Negotiated (PNTD)’ by Taghrid Lahham
• ‘Territorial linkages in rural development’ by Faith Nilsson
• ‘Multi-level targeting and value-chain development’ by Mounif Nourallah
• ‘Territorial route to the heart of Tuscany’ by Taysir Al-Ghanem

2. Slow food
1. ‘Slow food and indigenous knowledge’ by Anita Joshi
2. ‘Slow food = back to basics’ by Bethlehem Tafesse, Ericka Sorensen and Lourdes Lim
3. ‘Sustainable farming and ethics’ by Angela Colabelli
4. ‘Valorization of chestnut products in Tuscany’ by Isabelle Stordeur
5. ‘Defending biodiversity through slow food’ by Jessica Lattughi
6. ‘Slow food- a fast food countermovement’ by Mylene Kherallah
7. ‘Developing local markets and products’ by Nicole Hervieu
8. ‘Linkages to develop produits du terroir’ by Sandrine Jacqueson
9. ‘The slow food movement in Morocco’ by Shaza Saker        

3. Rural finance
1. ‘Rural finance interventions in Armenia’, by Henning Pedersen
2. ‘A selection of rural finance schemes in the EU’, by Lenyara Fundukova, Omer Zafar, Tawfiq El-Zabri and Denisa Butnaru
3. ‘Promotion of Sanduqs into formal microfinance institutions’, by Mohamed Abdelgadir

The learning event was well-received by the participants.  It has been a learning opportunity for engaging in direct contact with the rural development actors in Tuscany and to acquire first-hand observations. Sessions to further discuss the concrete linkages to NEN operations are planned to take place in early 2011.