Project News

The first JCC meeting was held on 19th (Tuesday) November 2013 at the Conference Room Second Floor, Kilimo I Building Temeke, and Dar es Salaam. The Permanent Secretary (PS) chaired the meeting to share the performance and progress of the Project activities, discuss & approve cost sharing policy, criteria for training target areas' selection and action plans of task groups. The total number of participants was 36 including representatives of the JICA Tanzania office, representatives of MAFC divisions, representatives of zonal irrigation offices, leaders of task groups (TGs) and JICA experts. The followings were notable features of the meeting:

1) Introduction of the Project Document (ProDoc): The Chief Advisor (CA) introduced the outline of the ProDoc that is prepared by organizing the information collected before the project design, the relationship from input to overall goal and the results of the project appraisal, aiming at establishing common understanding of the project among all the related persons.

On design of the project the CA explained that output 1 is associated with disseminating appropriate irrigated rice cultivation technologies through standard training while output 2 deals with development training approach for dissemination of appropriate rainfed rice cultivation technologies and output 3 is related to strengthening the subject matter training courses on the value chain of rice industry. The CA further narrated that cost for the standard training ranges between Tsh.35-38 millions. On the other hand 120 irrigation schemes and 36,000 farmers are expected to be reached the training effect. Furthermore, experiences from TANRICE-1 revealed that fund for the standard training course was inadequate or disbursed late from Local Government Authorities. Also the number of extension officers in irrigation schemes and rice production areas are inadequate (only 7,974 in 2012/2013) to support the training activities. Therefore modified standards training courses to reduce the cost may be necessary in order to meet the expected scale of reaching training effects.

The CA further explained that information for preparation of the project document was collected from various sources including agricultural sector development programme (ASDP) and comments from implementers and the division of crop development. The completed document was submitted to the representatives of MAFC, Ministry of Agriculture and Natural Resources Zanzibar and Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) Tanzania office.

2) Report of the Project Achievements until September, 2013: The Director of Training Division (DT) of MAFC reported the achievements from 16th Nov. 2012 to 30th Sept. 2013 for ten months. The major achievements are;

• a) holding of sensitization workshops at four training institutes with a total of 260 participants from 80 rice production districts,
• b) collection of profile data of 196 irrigation schemes, 116 rainfed lowland rice areas and 48 upland areas,
• c) conduction of training of trainers (TOT) courses for 10 tutors from two institutes that were not implementers of TANRICE-1,
• d) conduction of training for 15 farmers on NERICA production and 16 farmers on gender, and e) establishment of Research Advisory Committee (RAC).

Other achievements include provision of rice multiple thresher to Kilimanjaro Agricultural Training Center, and having sent three tutors and one extension personnel for short training courses in Japan.

3) Description and Approval of Overall Action Plans and Annual Action Plans, and Reporting the Progress: TG leaders of extension and monitoring (E&M) and rice agronomy (RA) described the overall action plans and annual action plans, and reported the progress for Output-1, Output-2 and Output-3 (Gender). Specifically, the leaders described activities, expected results and actions to be taken to realize the expected results. Comments, questions were asked and the leaders responded accordingly. Thereafter the plans were approved.

4) Description and Approval of Selection Criteria of Training Target Irrigation Schemes for Standard Training, and Description of the Selected Target Schemes for 2013/14 and 2014/15: The TG leader of irrigation scheme management described the selection criteria and selected target schemes of six (6) schemes for 2013/2014 and twelve (12) schemes for 2014/2015. After comments and questions followed by answers and clarifications, the criteria and selected schemes were approved ,

5) Description and Approval of Selection Criteria for Training Target Areas of Rainfed Rice: The TG leader of RA described the selection criteria and obtained the participants' approval.

6) Description and Approval of Cost Sharing Policy: The CA described the policy and obtained the participants' approval.

Joint CoordinatingCommittee Meeting Participants

Opening Address by the Permanent Secretary