By Andy Hill, MediaTrain Director
The International Fund for Agricultural Development may not roll off the tongue as easily or as often as some United Nations agencies. But IFAD is a key player across the developing world in helping the small-scale farmer get more and better from limited and often dwindling resources.
Take Burundi. One of the poorest and densely populated countries on the planet, its available land is limited, marshes are everywhere and the land “is exhausted,” in the words of one of the participants at a recent Communications workshop in the capital, Bujumbura.
This two-day event was one of a series that MediaTrain is conducting with the Rome-based body to raise the organisation’s visibility so that more governments, farmers, donors and ordinary people are aware of the way that IFAD works with African governments to maximise yields across the farm basket.
In Burundi alone IFAD has had remarkable results, boosting the output of the staple rice fourfold, doubling milk production and turning hundreds of hectares of neglected marshland into rich, productive soil for rice and other crops.
Civil war from 1993 to 2006 ravaged the country and killed 300,000 people. One of IFAD’s responses was to give a milking cow to war widows, allowing them not only to feed their fatherless children with a highly nutritious foodstuff but also to sell the surplus to put them through school. “One of the widows told me that she and her eight children had been lucky to eat once a day,” said another participant. “But after they got their cow they put food on the table three times a day and now the kids are all going to school.”
MediaTrain rolled out a workshop in French – our Directors train in Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian – to help staff deal with media enquiries succinctly and memorably in a way that will raise the profile of the work IFAD does and the people it works with. It helped them to be concise, precise and inspirational in dealing not only with the media, but in presentations to staff, to farmers, community leaders, the government, donors and the public.
For more details on how to get a tailor-made workshop for your organisation, fill in the contact form on this website or email us at contact@mediatrain.org.uk.