Want to reinvent agriculture? Involve youth!

The GFAiR Blog

Young farmer in Mali – What is agricultural innovation without youth?

It is 6:30 am. Johannesburg’s high-rise buildings stand far in the background, amidst the greenery, beautifully framed by the early African sun. This is the first sunrise I could enjoy in the last week at the Third Global Conference of Agricultural Research and Development (GCARD3).  It has been a very busy week, working 16-hour days every day.

I look down to the street below and notice many young people moving about. From the discussions I have heard all week, I can’t help but wonder about their future, and my future as a young person myself. Who will feed this growing population, this young population?

Hosted by the South African Research Council and co-organized by the Global Forum on Agricultural Research and CGIAR, the GCARD3 global event was an opportunity for interested parties to come together to confirm commitment to the new sustainable…

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Four Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Be a Youth Delegate or Social Reporter at a Global Conference

The GFAiR Blog

…..Especially not one of Peter Casier’s social media reporters.

Reasons:

1. You will get to meet inspiring people…. 
   And who likes to do that? You’ll learn from experts in their fields in sessions and round-table discussions, you’ll work together with other young people doing inspiring work and studies, and you’ll network with people from a huge array of organizations and backgrounds. Of course, that’s all terribly annoying. It might even give you ideas and inspiration for your own future path. Who else gets a headache just thinking about that?
   
2. You’ll gain knowledge and new skills…. 
   Which is never fun. And the usefulness of such is definitely overrated. Whether it’s improving your writing for general audiences, or using social media to reach the wider world, or learning new tools like audio and visual to get messages out there, it’s all quite dull. You might even start a fairly big project which…

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Keeping the Research Out of the Museum

The GFAiR Blog

It is widely recognized that most research sits on shelves or is stored in computer databases rather than being disseminated and used.

The most common challenge in disseminating research is the language in which reports are prepared. Researchers may be experts in their fields but the users of the research are common people in the street. Thus the architects and potential users of research often do not share the same language. Too often researchers dress their work up so it sounds fancy and complicated, producing technical research reports of different sizes but all in the language of the expert.

Unfortunately, theirs is not the language of farmers, policymakers or extension officers, who find much of what is being presented less relevant than it should be. This is not because the subject matter of the research is not interesting but because the language is abstruse. Researchers lack the capacity to produce reports that will…

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Yay!: My First post

Hello World!

What a cliche? You ask. You without a blog page. You who needs my help to open a blog page?

Catch you on the next one!

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do”