To promote collaboration among partners and BMGF grantees working to transform agriculture
To identfy areas for alignment and synergy btween the Government,BMGF andother partnersTo introduce Tanzania Agriculture Investment Mapping as a tool for collaboration
Brief Summary of Workshop outputs:
The opening speech was given by Hon. Titus Kamani, Minister for Livestock & Fisheries Deveopment on behalf of the Minister for Agriculture, Food Security and Cooperatives. In the speech, the Minister expressed government’s appreciation of the BMGF support to Tanzania, underscored the need to avoid duplication and extended an official invitation for the BMGF to open up a permanent centre in Tanzania. He also mentioned SAGCOT as one of the efforts made by the GoT, as well as BRN and Tanzanian Food Plan.
BMGF presented an overview of its support both globally and in Tanzania as well as a brief on the different components of their operations; health, development and US education. The mapping of BMGF implementing partners in Tanzania was also presented.They are currently working on a more comprehensive mapping to including all work being done in the agriculture sector.
Land use and land rights were raised as part of serious problems facing agriculture sector in terms of access to land and the rights of women that need to be looked into more closely. BMGF said they do not focus on this but recognise it as a problem and do raise it in its circles.
On overview of the country’s Agriculture Sector Developmnet Programme (ASDP) was presented and then BMGF draft Tanzania Country Framework was also presented. The main aim was to find to what extent the draft is informed by the ASDP. The BMGF team pointed out that the objective was to align their strategy to the ASDP and contribute to the country’s own strategy.
It was pointed out that focus on Value Chains and systems offer opportunity to think strategically about future investments in agriculture sector
The BMGF team also made a presentation on Monitoring and evaluation
The President Delivering Bureau -Deputy CEO made a presentation on the Agriculture Delivery Division (ADD). He explained about the PDB/ADD vision and mission as well the BRN National Key Resutls Areas (NKRAs), Key Indicators for the Agricluture NKRA and progress to date. From the discussion that ensued two important points were underscored; the need to improve information flow among all stakeholders and the importance for enhanced collaboration and coordination.
The Tanzania Agriculture Investment Mapping (TAN AIM) tool which was presented on the last day of the workshop, generated a lot of interesting dicsussion.There was unamious agreement that as much as the tool could be useful in showing the investments in the sector and thus help in guiding investment decision, the Ministry of Agriculture has to fully own it in order to ensure its sustainability and relevancy over time.
Throughout the workshop there were group discussions and plenary sessions. Partcipants broke into smaller groups based on work themes and we, UNDP staff, attended the group on training and capacity building. The aim of these groups were to discuss potential ways of collaboration in their respective areas. Ours was quite fruitful as we learned that a lot of levels are included in capacity building efforts, from UNDP at an institutional level, to research, management training, and farmers groups. There were some concrete proposals made on collaboration between UNDP and SUA in terms of UNDP’s involvement in trainings, as well as creating links between institutional, research and ground work through the existence of farmers groups.
Recommendation /Action to be Taken:
BMGF has 70 plus grantees in agriculture sector alone in Tanzania. It is eager to see more collaboration among the grantees and to have them better coordinated. UNDP CO can seize this opportunity to work with BMGF to make collaboration and coordination happen. This will add a lot of value to the existing partnership with the Foundation.
