More people trained, more impact

That means that an estimated 1,600 people received training, who in turn will train many others.

Demand for red meat from cattle, goats and sheep in South Africa is high. Nearly half of the country's livestock is owned by small-scale farmers on communal lands. So, they must supply a lot of red meat, right? Wrong. Only 5% of the formal red meat market is supplied by these farmers. There is high demand, and high potential among the local farmers. So, where does this go wrong? It’s the lack of knowledge.

When a group, organisation or institution is missing specific knowledge to develop their capacity, they can apply to the Orange Knowledge Programme for a Tailor-made Training (TMT). These are group training courses with a maximum funding of € 75,000 and the training must take place within a year. “Especially the ‘train-the-trainers’ aspect of the Tailor-made Training courses create tremendous leverage,” explains Luuk Bosma, who has been managing group training for many years at Nuffic.

Restoring biodiversity

To help small-scale farmers get more meat to market, Wageningen Centre for Development Innovation in the Netherlands set up a TMT for farm organisation leaders, workers at Conservation South Africa, a large nature conservation NGO, and a new social enterprise called Meat Naturally. This specific group of farmers lives and works in sensitive national landscapes such as the Mzimvubu Catchment, the Namakwa District and the Kruger to Canyons Biosphere Reserve Region.

The training courses provided practical information on sustainable animal herding and on how to restore biodiversity while getting more business with local meat wholesalers. “Being able to design the training courses around the needs of these farmers before and during the project, is one of the great advantages of a tailor-made training,” says Judith Jacobs of the WCDI, who coordinated this TMT project. “When aiming at increasing the capacity of an organisation, a TMT clearly brings more impact than a conventional one-off training,” she says.

“I learned about business improvement and value chains,” said Mkhatshwa Vanessa, a herd monitor in the village of Welverdiend who attended the training. “We need to work together so that our business can grow.” The TMT was completed in 2018 and Meat Naturally aims to adopt farmers as shareholders in future.

Water in Burkina Faso

The Dutch have particularly high levels of expertise in the Water sector. There is a need in the Compact Plus country (programme categories) Burkina Faso to increase knowledge in this sector. The local water purification authority, Direction Régional de l'eau et de l'Assainissement (DREA) in Ouagadougou, which falls under the water ministry, joined forces with Dutch company Acacia Water. The government of Burkina Faso has developed a national water policy. However, the DREA has little experience in developing integrated water management plans. The staff indicated a need to get more expertise on the technical, socio-economic and political areas which often have to be combined to develop integrated water resource management plans. These plans ultimately secure both fair access to water and sustainable use of scarce water resources.

Local Knowledge

This specific Tailor-Made Training initiative was sparked by local knowledge of the challenges on the ground from a Dutch religious charitable foundation Stichting Woord en Daad, which focuses on women's groups and agriculture. They work together with DREA to establish local water conservation projects. Acacia Water then applied for the Tailor-Made Training funding from the Orange Knowledge Programme which was allocated in August 2018 and began in that same month.

This is another good example of how these group training courses can benefit organisations in partner countries. Local needs are being answered by Dutch expertise and funding towards sustainable capacity development.

Brand new, weightier, instrument

A new more ‘heavy weight’ variation of TMT was launched in 2018: Tailor-Made Training Plus. “This is a longer term instrument, for training courses which run over a 2-year period and have a maximum funding of € 400,000 over that period. In full-programme countries, Tailor-Made Training Plus is granted after a dedicated call for proposals. This means a specific request in line with the earlier-agreed Country Programme of Implementation. In compact plus countries, the calls set out for Tailor-Made Training Plus are general calls”, explains Luuk Bosma. “It is a new instrument of which we have high expectations.”

“In my country, sexual and reproductive rights are luxuries that we don’t talk about.”

- Maha Ahmed Abdulla Basodan, trained in Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights, Yemen

Yemeni health care

“In my country, sexual and reproductive rights are luxuries that we don’t talk about,” says Maha Ahmed Abdulla Basodan, Consultant at SAWT, a health and education association for development in Yemen. “Training on Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) and sexual violence has introduced me to the sphere of rights.”

She attended a Tailor-Made Training Plus course in Jordan (conflict zone Yemen is considered too unsafe) which was especially made for Yemeni health care providers and other health and social development officials together with the Dutch KIT Royal Tropical Institute. The course was designed to look into ways to improve Sexual reproductive health and rights through a combined human rights and health care-based approach. “Yemen is in a time of conflict where sexual violence is happening,” says Dr Mosleh Altoali, Deputy Minister of Public Health and Population. “This course offers an opportunity to address sexual violence now and to find solutions.”