IIRR Celebrates 10 years of presence in Africa

Members of the Global Board of Trustees of IIRR will be converging in Kenya this month to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of its presence in Africa.

Staff of the IIRR Africa Regional Center are delighted that Kenya has for the first time ever been honored by the IIRR Board to host their annual board meeting as part of the series of events lined up for celebration of the center’s achievements since its inception. A record 13 Trustees are expected at the event slated for 11th-16th June 2006 that is designed to evaluate IIRR’s development achievements in Africa and assess the viability of IIRR Africa’s future plan.

IIRR is a pioneer in promoting integrated, people-centered and sustainable development since the 1920s and has been working in Africa since 1995 from its regional base in Nairobi.  Over the past 10 years, IIRR has worked in partnership with community-based development organizations, governments and grassroots communities to realize their productive, economic, social, and intellectual potential and to ensure sustainable impact in their lives and communities.

To demonstrate positive impact on poverty reduction through capacity building, IIRR works with 22 community based organizations and local NGOs in Kenya. The objective of the activities is to promote micro-enterprises, to ensure food security and income generation. In the arid and semi-arid lands of northern Kenya, IIRR supports partners to integrate gender and HIV/AIDS in their drought cycle management and seeks to promote pastoralist education with a special emphasis on the girl-child’s education.  In Ethiopia, IIRR works with 42 Federal and Regional State Governments agencies, NGOs and community organizations. IIRR is also engaged with schools and media institutions in building gender leadership, reproductive health and HIV/AIDS as well as micro-enterprise development. IIRR has also recently established a country office in Uganda and is pursuing emerging opportunities for operations in South Sudan. Indeed in showcasing its successes during its 10th year anniversary, IIRR-Africa will be keen to demonstrate its competence in taking the frontline in initiating development programs in the new setting of South Sudan.

Under the theme “Capacity Building for Poverty Reduction”, the celebration activities will include presentations by IIRR program staff and its partners, exhibitions by local partners and field visits to the Western Kenya micro-enterprise projects.  The field visits are designed to enable board members to have first hand contact with people at the project level besides providing an opportunity for them to acquaint themselves with the specific challenges confronting communities at Kenya’s grassroots in their quest for poverty reduction. These visits are on the whole deemed vital to enabling board members appreciate the conditions under which local partnerships with IIRR-Africa have bloomed.

The Board visit comes against the background of dwindling donor project funding and is viewed as vital to restoring continued funding for IIRR’s local partners in their areas of operation. The hosting of this visit in Kenya therefore presents an invaluable opportunity for holding consultations with the various stakeholders, including the business community who shall be granted exclusive audience at a special business luncheon programmed during the visit. Besides serving as a showcase of IIRR’s contribution towards poverty reduction through capacity building development programs, IIRR’s interaction with the corporate sector will provide an opportunity to introduce the business community to IIRR work and its trustees and explore potential areas of future partnership and strengthen existing partnerships with the business community to fulfill their social responsibility mission.

The celebrations have attracted overwhelming support from donor partners and business community alike and are to be used as a platform for the launch of a book entitled Chain Empowerment: Supporting African Farmers to Develop Markets, which outlines strategies that NGOs and business development services can adopt to support smallholders to overcome challenges of securing market access and increasing incomes. This publication is produced jointly by the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT)-Amsterdam, Faida Market Link Company Limited-Arusha and IIRR–Africa, with grants from two Dutch organizations namely Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) and Cordaid.

8 Posted on : June 14, 2006