Capacity Development Unit and East African Regional Office organized a consultative workshop to review ICRAF’s draft capacity development strategy with its partners. The workshop also provided an opportunity to systematically discuss the capacity development needs of the east African partners in agroforestry. The three day workshop brought 26 participants together from agricultural ministries, research institutes and universities on agroforestry, extension agencies and non-governmental organizations of Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda in Tanzania’s capital, Dar es Salam. The workshop spanned over 6 sessions and combined several delivery formats, including focused but brief presentations, group work, and plenary discussions. The Ice Breaker in the beginning assisted in breaking the barriers of formality and assisted participants to know and mingle with each other during the workshop. During the sessions, the participants also experienced a number of energizers that kept the group active for the long discussion sessions.

The participants reviewed ICRAF’s draft capacity development strategy on day 1, and carried out a SWOT analysis of the strategy. This analysis will provide inputs to the review of the strategy that has already commenced. An Ethiopian partner, enthused by the exercise, shared his views in these words: “This workshop on refining ICRAF’s CD strategy shows that ICRAF is once again ready to engage with partners and develop their capacity”.

The second day of the workshop was reserved for identification of partners’ capacity development priorities regarding agroforestry. The participants first teamed up by country of origin and then by the profession and listed key capacity development priorities. They then used a scoring /ranking methodology to discern critical areas of capacity development needs in agroforestry from general needs. The discussions within each of these groups were lively and promoted dialogue, discussion and learning, as one of the Rwandan participants put it: “I had always looked at value chain analysis of tree products as relatively less important before this workshop. Through these discussions, I realized how important it is…”

The workshop also used a combination of quantitative and qualitative feedback approach to capture effectiveness and learning. For some of the participants, this methodology was innovative and they intend to deploy such q-squared methods in their own work: “The approach to evaluate the workshop through reflexive account is something I can make practical use of in my future work”.