Welcome to a rather thick issue of the Podcaster. We have a lot of news! The first item highlights a workshop held in Wageningen in late August to develop the detailed plans for Monitoring and Evaluation within N2Africa as well as the Master Plans for project activities. Considerable effort is being put into standardization of data collection and establishment of a database structure that will make all of our data openly accessible to all partners within N2Africa, and soon to everybody. Part of these activities involves the use of tablets for data collection that proved to provide some fun for workshop participants.
We have N2Africa updates from all of the Core and Tier 1 Countries – with a wealth of information on exciting developments in the field with partners. In addition we report on an AGRA workshop held in Malawi to develop fertilizer recommendations in which data from N2Africa on inoculants and legume fertilizers played an important role. We provide links to three published articles from N2Africa students – the first report of soyabean rust in Tanzania from Harun Murithi, a report on farmers’ use and the economics and of inoculants in Kenya from Samuel Mutuma, and a report on identifying elite rhizobia for soyabean in Kenya from Maureen Waswa, as well as to two MSc theses that can be downloaded from the website.
In addition – we have been busy refreshing the website to enable documents to be found more easily. There is a powerful search function on the website that allows you to search using keywords which we hope you will use. Feedback is welcome of course! From my side – I have given a number of talks on our work in N2Africa at various conferences and workshops and always get a very positive response. None of what N2Africa does would be possible without the strong support of all or our partners so thanks again for your continuing contribution! If you have news to share we are always looking for stories for the next Podcaster.
Ken Giller