TAAF aims to maintain person to person contact with its awardees, acting as a professional support agency rather than simply a funding body.
Awardees in the field are encouraged to send regular progress reports to their mentors. These serve to keep the committee informed of the awardees' progress, alert the mentor to any problems that the awardee may have encountered, and enable the mentor - either directly or by calling on other specialist members of TAA - to provide relevant technical and other forms of advice to their mentees.
Gobabeb Research and Training Centre, Namibia
Elizabeth Adams writes from the Gobabeb Research and Training Centre, Namibia, where she has been working as a TAAF awardee since January 2008
read more...Talamanca Small Producers' Association, Costa Rica
Jonathan Stern worked for 6 months in 2008 as a TAAF
awardee with the Association of Small Producers of Talamanca (APPTA) in
Costa Rica. APPTA is a co-operative which services over 1200 small producers
of cocoa and other tropical fruit crops. It processes and markets their
produce on a fair trade basis. Jonathan's work was to conduct an analysis
of the economics of cocoa production, processing and marketing, and to
train co-operative staff in the methods of financial analysis employed.
APPTA asked Jonathan to extend his stay for a further 4 months, paid partly
by the co-operative and partly by TAAF, to apply the financial model he
had developed to other crops and to investigate a proposed ecotourism
project. Between the 2 phases of the assignment Jonathan was invited by
the Centro Agronómico Tropical de Investigación y Enseñanza
(CATIE) to undertake a 3 month consultancy for COCABO, a similar cocoa
producers' co-operative across the border in Panama.
Sulaymaniyah Governorate, Iraqi Kurdistan
James Gould-Bourn has just returned from Iraqi Kurdistan where he was undertaking research on the socio-economic impact of landmines on agriculture.
read more...Kaziranga National Park, Assam, India
Lydia Cole writes from Kaziranga National Park in Assam, where she has conducted research for her MSc at Oxford University Centre for the Environment..
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