AKI's Project Manager Julia Fendel and Program Manager Julian Friesinger from the Andreas Hermes Akademie (AHA) traveled to the capital of Rwanda Kigali from January 30 to February 03, 2023 to meet the Pan-African Farmers’ Organization (PAFO) and lay the first milestones for the "Pan African Farmer Organisation Exchange Platform" project.

The goal of the “Pan African Farmer Organisation Exchange Platform” project is to create a sustainable digital exchange platform, which will be managed by PAFO, to bring regional and national farmer organizations from across Africa together. This will allow African farmer organizations to share experiences, learn from each other, and build relevant networks to better address current and future global challenges together, both at the national and international levels.

This concept will be based on the experiences of the Transitional Agriculture project (click HERE for the final report of the Transitional Agriculture project), which was implemented by AgrarKontakte International (AKI) and the Andreas Hermes Akademie (AHA) under the umbrella of the World Farmer Organsiation (WFO) together with six national farmer organizations from Germany, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Rwanda and Russia from 2020 to 2022.

Thus, one of the main tasks of Julia Fendel (head of the Transitional Agriculture project which was completed in 2022) during her stay in Kigali was to provide technical expertise based on the Transitional Agriculture project to the PAFO project coordinator Insaf Boughdiri, who will manage the platform in the future. In addition, the project partners PAFO, AHA and AKI were not only able to get to know each other, but also to jointly discuss the project and prepare a schedule for the next six months. The first major milestone in this regard will be the implementation of the first digital seminars.  The topics for this will be determined from the results of the surveys to be conducted until the end of April 2023 among the participants, which are composed of representatives from different regional and national farmers' organisations from all over Africa.