Events

Bringing Local Economic Development and Value Chain Development Approaches to Heifer SA

From February 23 to 27 2009, 15 Heifer Project South Africa staff and Heifer's Southern African regional planning, monitoring and evaluation officer gathered in KwaZulu Natal's (South Africa) Midlands for a one- week training workshop.

The workshop, tailor made to meet Heifer's SA needs, facilitated by the Learning, Monitoring and Research Facility (LMRF) i

ntroduced the principles of Local Economic Development, Value Chain Development and Monitoring, Evaluation and Impact Assessment.

The event marked the first of a 4-phase Heifer-LMRF collaboration that aims at bringing local economic development and value chain development approaches to Heifer Project SA.

Heifer's Strategic Plan 2007-2010 aims positioning itself strategically in the South Africa development context. This would include a further clarification and alignment of Heifer's current interventions to local provincial and national development plans and make transparent its contributions toward the Millennium Development Goals. Developing some of its projects towards alignment with LED plans in communities is considered a crucial first step in the process.

As working towards Local or Community Economic Development adds a new dimension to work, Heifer-SA realised the need for the development of staff capacities enabling them to adopt the LED approach to their work with the communities. More in particular, Heifer-SA desired its staff to:

•  Develop a common understanding of LED among Heifer-SA staff and immediate stakeholders.
•  Gain an understanding of current LED initiatives by other stakeholders, in the communities where Heifer-SA operate.

"Learning by doing" and "Learning from each other" were the principles underlying the facilitation and learning processes. This meant that participants were actively involved through a mix of standard lectures followed by class discussions, more interactive lectures interlaced with questions and discussions, brainstorms, mind maps, a role play and other group work.

Group work used Heifer SA poultry, goat and diary cattle projects as case materials. On Wednesday, participants visited one of Heifer's projects in Ngwangwane (Riverside, Ixopo) where they interviewed project beneficiaries on their dairy goats and potato production plots and attempted to map the respective value chains.

This field work revealed, amongst others, that selling goat milk from individual farmers to individuals was culturally sensitive. Bulking the milk from various producers and then selling it as milk, cheese or "maas" would overcome this constraint thus increasing producer benefits and consumer confidence in hygienic measure being taken. There was also a desire for increased vegetable production in addition to the goat project.

Immediately before and after the workshop participants assessed their own skills to determine to what extent the workshop contributed to improving them.

A full workshop report will be posted on the website at the end of April 2009. For more information on LMRF please visit http://www.lmrf.org.za