Ephrem Tessema, from IPMS project jointly with the Ministry of Agriculture women’s affairs directorate, conducted a four day training (Nov.16-18) on gender mainstreaming to sixty Agricultural Growth Program (AGP) coordinators and focal persons in Adama. The gender training is part of a 10 day training that is organized by the AGP of the Ministry of Agriculture. Training participants from the four regions and 28 zonal offices attended three sets of training on community level participatory planning (CLPP), agricultural extension methods and approaches, and gender mainstreaming in agriculture. IPMS provided a resource person to the third set, gender mainstreaming, to share its experience on the subject and to familiarize the participants with the IPMS toolkit for gender analysis of crop and livestock production technologies and service provision, as well as the Gender mainstreaming manual. Copies of these toolkits and manual were distributed to participants. Regional AGP coordinators, zonal AGP focal persons, extension experts, subject matter specialists, and gender specialist attended the training. The training ended with a half day field visit to one of the IPMS sites, Adaa district, where the project worked with women producers through the use of participatory market oriented agricultural development. Women involved in apiculture and diary production were targets of the visit on the last day of the training.

On this occasion, the Ethiopian Agriculture Portal (www.eap.gov.et), a gateway for agricultural information resources in Ethiopia, was demonstrated to participants. Few of the participants had prior knowledge of the portal and have used it in different occasions. Some found it very useful and others claimed that page displays slow. After EAP demonstration, most of the participants were eager to look at it; some used their mobile phone internet to look at the portal right after the demonstration.