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Vacancy Project Manager Sierra Leone  

Agronomist / Agricultural Economist 
Contract duration: One year renewable for four years.
Required Start Date: March 2009

COOPI – Cooperazione Internazionale has been working in Sierra Leone since 1971. Under its next Country Strategic Plan 2009-11, COOPI will work in three main programme areas: (1) Livelihoods, Food Security and Youth Employment (2) Women's Rights to health education, protection and participation (3) Children Rights to education, health, safe water and protection.

Under its first programme area COOPI is implementing a 4-year Urban Food Security project in Freetown/Western Area funded by the European Union (EU) with co-financing from the Dutch Ministry for Cooperation (DGIS), channeled through the RUAF Foundation. The project is implemented in partnership with ETC-RUAF (International Network of Resource Centers on Urban Agriculture and Food Security), Sierra Leone Youth Empowerment Organisation and Sierra Leone National Association of Farmers and in close cooperation with Njala University and local and national institutional and civil society stakeholders under the umbrella of Freetown Multi Stakeholder Forum on Urban and Peri Urban Agriculture. For more information on Profile and Main tasks and responsibilities please click here.

UA Magazine no. 20 - Water for Urban Agriculture

The latest issue of the re-designed Urban Agriculture Magazine, no 20 "Water for Urban Agriculture", is now published online.

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Networking event at the World Urban Forum in Nanjing

The RUAF Foundation together with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the International Development Research Centre, Urban Harvest, the Chinese Urban Agriculture Association and the Nanjing Agriculture and Forestry Bureau will organise a session called "Urban and peri-urban agriculture for Resilient Cities (Green, Productive and Socially Inclusive)" during the World Urban Forum of UN Habitat from 3 to 7 November.

Please click here for more information on this event and find out more about the speakers, the booth and the urban agriculture tour! 

Towards a Water-Sustainable City of the Future

 

Please click here to watch this SWITCH video (18 min). "SWITCH is a project supported by the European Commission, a global effort of 33 partners from 15 countries to bring the Water-Sustainable City of the Future one step closer. The SWITCH recipe is a combination of scientific research, innovative technologies and demonstrations in several cities. To find out more about the project, watch the video."

 

 

Call for Contributions

Please find here the Call for Contributions for Urban Agriculture Magazine No. 21: Linking Relief, Rehabilitation and Development - A role for Urban Agriculture?

Distance learning courses on urban agriculture

In response to an increasing demand for training in urban agriculture, ETC-Urban Agriculture, RUAF, the Ryerson University’s G. Raymond Chang School of Continuing Education and Centre for Studies in Food Security are developing a series of distance education courses on urban agriculture in partnership with. The courses are being offered in two modalities: Accredited and Free and self-paced.

For more information click here. 

Wastewater use in urban agriculture

Please click here to access a recent global publication by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) on wastewater use in urban agriculture called "Drivers and characteristics of wastewater agriculture in developing countries – results from a global assessment".

Policy briefs on peri-urban aquaculture and urban agriculture

Please go to the RUAF publications section to access the following policy briefs:

  • 5 policy briefs (2006) focussing on the recommendations following from the PAPUSSA project to guide policy makers and
    other senior stakeholders in further development of the peri-urban aquaculture sector.
  • 9 urban agriculture policy briefs (2003), produced for the Cities Feeding People programme (CFP) (now UPE) of IDRC, aim to raise awareness, mobilize support for, and strengthen the capacities of municipal governments to implement urban agriculture programs and policies.

RUAF Update #10 now online

Please check here the latest and previous versions of the RUAF Update.

Urban agriculture initiative in Central Africa

A workshop on urban agriculture, participatory governance and social inclusion was held in Bukavu (DR Congo) from 24-28 September. The workshop was organized and supported by DIOBASS (DR Congo), RUAF, Institut de la Vie, DGCD, CECODEL and CGRI (Belgium) and counted with the participation of 7 city teams made up of 3 representatives from national (2 Provincial Ministers of Agriculture) and local government representatives (2 Mayors, a vice-Mayor and a Chef of the City plan) NGOs or Community-Based Organizations and Universities from Bukavu, Butembo, Goma, Kinshasa, Kisangani and Lubumbashi (Congo) and Ngozi (Burundi) as well as with representatives from international organizations (GlobalHort, Tanzania, the African Consortium on Urban Agriculture-Cameroun and IAGU-Dakar). Most workshop participants belong to the regional urban agriculture network established in 2003.

Workshop participants underlined the specific contribution urban agriculture can make to food security and livelihood development in the region, and to respond to specific needs of several vulnerable groups (schoolchildren, HIV-AIDS affected families, poor urban producers). They also identified a number of closely related key factors that prevent urban agriculture to live up to its potential, including the generally low levels of productivity, the lack of working models and knowledge on sustainable intensification of urban agriculture, the limited capacities of support organizations in areas such as technology development, planning, monitoring and evaluation, and financial services for urban agricultural development, and the low level of priority given to urban agricultural development in policy, law making and planning. Please click here to access the full workshop report.

Priorities for the development of regional programmes on urban agriculture in the region were identified as: (1) the development of school gardens, and (2) the strengthening of small urban and peri-urban producers in their production, processing and marketing strategies. A project formulation committee has been put in place and agreements were made to continue promoting urban agriculture development at city, national and regional level. A virtual newsletter, informing all workshop and network participants about progress made and new activities set up, is being disseminated every 3 months. For more information, please contact: Marielle Dubbeling m.dubbeling@etcnl.nl; Sylvain Mapatano (Mapatano_s@yahoo.fr)

Initiative under Way to Create North American Urban and Periurban Agriculture Alliance

Click here to learn more.

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