ISSD and CASCAPE gender experts met to discuss complimentarity and a joint way forward in our collective efforts on gender issues in the Ethiopian food system.
A discussion and experience sharing was held between ISSDs Gender and rural development expert and Knowledge sharing expert and Cascapes gender and nutrition Expert regarding the works of the two projects on the specific area and the challenge they face while doing the work. And also the two projects discussed about the collaboration activities they can do focusing gender and nutrition.
Workalem Girma the gender and rural expert of ISSD briefed the work of ISSD regarding gender and nutrition as she stated that the project strictly have a policy of gender sensitiveness in all the work for instance she mentioned that from all the 3600 farmers ISSD reached 50% which are 1800 are females and also in the works like Crowd sourcing and participatory variety selection females are given as much opportunity as men do.
The other point the expert mentioned is that the capacity building that have to be done on own project staff to increase their awareness toward gender mainstreaming and nutrition related to this the expert mentioned the work ISSD do on Quality protein maize, faba bean, field p and haricot bean varieties specifically around Derashe and Dalucha has been deployed .
In the Cascape side the gender and nutrition expert Mengistu Fereja also briefed the team about the gender and nutrition work the project do, as he explains 3 major points are focused regarding nutrition and gender, Nutrition education is one of the 3 points to focus on which is about narrowing the nutrition gap of the region and fulfilling that gap and the 2nd point he mentioned was introducing better technology specially that can decrease the labor work of women for instance he mentioned the new technology they introduced the machine that can peel the ‘inset’ which can decrease women’s energy and time he said.
The third point he mentioned as final core focusing point is production in this section he mentioned Cascape is focusing on vegetable production specifically encouraging home gardening for women’s and introducing best quality vegetables are the basic point discussed in the Cascape side.
As a challenge of work for this specific area lack of seed access was mentioned by both experts as a major constraint and also availability of quality seed is mentioned as a problem as well
In terms of collaboration work as a first step the team decided to have the gender and nutrition core group meeting from CASCAPE, REALISE and ISSD in the first week of October and following that setting a road map of work and related works are planned as a team and also other trainings and awareness creating campaigns are panned afterwards the core team meeting.
ENSP - Ethiopia-Netherlands Seed Partnership 