SEVIA in Transition
After 5 years of intensive extension work that hosted 1161 demonstrations, trained 1435 sector professionals and reached 48341 farmers in Tanzania, SEVIA is indeed a project in transition.
While the SEVIA Centre continues to train students, lead farmers and sector professionals, the outreach is now being done by partner companies (Rijk Zwaan and East-West Seed) who absorbed the majority of the professional/technical staff, including the management.
One of the recent more groups to come for training comprised of 26 women from Kilimanjaro who are pictured here learning raising of seedlings from Trainer Emmanuel Itonye.
To mark this milestone, on the 19th of December 2019 SEVIA held a joint Christmas and Farewel1 party for all staff and especially in honour of team members leaving SEVIA by 31 December 2019. A team of 18 staff members remained, which is a far cry from the heydays of 2016/17 when we had 48 staff members. With this transition, Team SEVIA and the Board have had to think outside the box. The good news is that this the remaining team will continue the training effort at the SEVIA Centre and that is this team will have advisory and training support from partner companies.
The majority of the remainers
The staff exodus was highlighted by the departure of eleven staff members who left SEVIA on 31 December 2019.
The 31 December 2019 “Brexiteers”
As the 2019 year drew to a close, we pulled down the curtain on the first chapter of SEVIA. Going forward beyond December 2019, SEVIA 2.0 will no longer have a significant outreach component; that outreach will be done by Rijk Zwaan through its field team and through EWS using its Knowledge Transfer team. We must add that this knowledge transfer work has gone beyond the borders of Tanzania into countries like Uganda and Nigeria through initiatives by our partners.
