you betta work!

My work has finally started to materialize. I am here to work on two assignments: an agro-economics project and a collaborative community development project in the social impact sector. As a “consultant” I will be dividing my time 30/70 between the agricultural marketing initiative (that serves to build market linkages between 3,000 sesame farmers in the West Nile district and intermediary agricultural distributors) and the more expansive INPACT initiative. The later is looking at mobilizing and empowering the local community to participate in and benefit from two national governmental policies (Universal Primary Education/UPE and the Plan for Modernization of Agriculture/PMA), which target the poorest and most marginalized people in Uganda. The initiative is strengthening and building the capacity of local community based and civil society organizations – ultimately, in order to facilitate the organizations to do their work. For the first project I am responsible to help close out phase one (which ended December 2006) through documentation and evaluation (reviewing documents, conducting interviews, surveys, etc), and prepare the national staff/country office, farmers, intermediary partners, and international donors/funders for phase two, which begins in July 2007. For INPACT, I am here to help guide some of the smaller partners with organizational strategies (record keeping, reporting, documenting, etc) and to document (with photography!) the impacts of INPACT for the local government. I’ll also be helping to write quarterly reports and briefings and along with general program operations. Tomorrow I’ll be going to the field for the first time to meet with 7 of our intermediary partners and see some of the working methodologies so that I can begin considering the recommendations that I am supposed to make…cheers to fieldwork!