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| March 2023 |
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Dear ,
Thank you for reading our newsletter.
Springtime is coming and the production season starts. This is an excellent period for for study tours or trainings in the Netherlands!
In this newsletter, we provide more information about our projects in Iraq, Benin and Ethiopia. You can also read about our study tour for a government delegation from Cambodia and our visit to the Dairy and Agri Expo in Punjab, India. These articles will give you a brief overview of our different activities over the last three months. You are welcome to visit our website to read about all our projects over the last 10 years. You can select our activities by sector, service or region.
Please let us know your plans for 2023 and contact one of us at HollandDoor.
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Practical training "Greenhouse Vegetable Cultivation"
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HollandDoor is initiating a practical greenhouse vegetable cultivation training titled “The Eye of the Grower”. It targets on those who want to expand their theoretical and practical cultivation knowledge and want to get a better understanding of the principles of optimizing greenhouse vegetable production.
This training is scheduled from March 26 th – April 2 st 2023, which equals with the start of production season in the Netherlands. For more information and registration click here.
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Linking agricultural cooperatives and the market in Cambodia
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Linking agricultural cooperatives with the private sector and the market is high on the agenda of the Cambodian government. In November 2022, HollandDoor organized and guided a high-level government delegation on this theme during a study tour in the Netherlands. The study tour was part of the multi-year Cambodia Agriculture Sector Diversification Project (CASDP), which is partly funded by the World Bank.
CASDP promotes a commercially viable and resilient agriculture sector in Cambodia by supporting and facilitating the sector to diversify. One of the key dimensions of diversification concerns strengthening the position of agricultural cooperatives and linking them to national and international markets. This was the focus of the study tour. In addition to visiting various cooperatives during the study tour, the functioning of the so-called Dutch diamond model (interrelations between the government, research and education, the private sector, and civil society) was one of the key learning points of the week.
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OKP Project in Benin comes to an end
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At the end of 2022, we wrapped up the OKP (Orange Knowledge Programme) project in Benin.
In a final course, 60 teachers were taught how to put into practice the theory they had been learning over the past two years.
In a major closing session, we summarized the project’s various activities. We received a great deal of positive feedback from participants.
Of course, the end of a project should not be the end of learning, so we introduced a system that will enable the different schools to develop projects in the areas of horticulture, irrigation, and animal production. In these projects the participants or teachers gain experience by working on practical activities. This experience will be a useful teaching tool, which can hopefully be transferred to the students in the schools so they can develop their practical knowledge as well.
In this way, the project will be virtually extended for another period and increase the scope of its impact.
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Training for female extension workers in Iraq
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Twenty-five female extension workers received their second training in Anbar, Iraq, in January 2023. The training had a special focus on extension work and extension skills. The Nuffic-funded training was specifically designed for women and covered topics such as hydroponics and animal husbandry. The special focus on extension work and extension skills was well received by the participants, as their position as female extension workers is challenging in the context of the situation in Iraq. A video of the training explains why.
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With CowSignals® at the Dairy & Agri Expo in Punjab
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In early February 2023, HollandDoor was at the Dairy & Agri Expo in Ludhiana, organized by the Progressive Dairy Farmers Association (PDFA) from Punjab. The Dairy & Agri Expo is a highly professional trade exhibition.This year’s exhibition already featured several Dutch companies among the more than 150 exhibitors. Next year, we plan to organize, together with the Dutch Embassy, a Holland Pavilion with five to ten companies from the Netherlands.
During the trip to Punjab, HollandDoor attended two workshops with dairy farmers in Ludhiana and in Chandigarh. One workshop was held on a farm with Holstein cows, while another featured Sahiwal cows. Ad Merks, HollandDoor's certified master trainer of CowSignals®, showed how the CowSignals® concept will improve cow health and cow welfare. The CowSignals® concept is an excellent tool for Train the Trainers programs (see www.cowsignals.com). We also use this concept in agricultural schools for teachers and students in other countries in Africa and Asia.
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Implementing practical education in Ethiopia
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At the beginning of November, Lisanne Oskam from HollandDoor visited Ethiopia with Mark Bos from Qpoint as part of the Bright Future in Agriculture project. Our focus this time was on implementing practical education at some of the eight ATVET schools. Over the past 2.5 years, we have been training the agricultural teachers of these schools online and offline in practical education and developing skill sheets in fields such as milking, health, and feed and fertility.
Now the time has come for them to incorporate the practical assignments into their lessons, starting with the new students in January this year. At the beginning of March, the Bright Future in Agriculture project will conclude with a final seminar, and we will visit the other schools to coach them during the practical lessons. Practice makes perfect, as they say, so it is very important that the teachers practice a lot with their fellow teachers. These exercises are useful, functional and sometimes quite complicated!
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