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Despite the effect of the COVID-19 Pandemic, JICA Tsukuba has been holding the training course of "IMPROVEMENT OF RICE CULTIVATION TECHNIQUES (for Extension Officers) JFY 2019" since March 2020. The participants from eleven countries; Afghanistan, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Uganda, and Zambia are learning seedling management, data collection methods, and other beneficial knowledge through lectures and practical training.

On 28 July 2020, three JICA Experts (Dr. Jiro Nozaka, Mr. Nobuki Kojima, and Mr. Daiki Shitomi) visited JICA Tsukuba Center to attend the field day, organized by JICA Tsukuba Center in order to get feedback from experts, instructors and programme officers for the improvement of experiments under the training.

Participants presented progress of their experiment as a mid-term report. Mr. Kiirya Peter , an Agricultural Officer from Uganda, Bugiri District Local Government is one of the participants in this training and implementing an experiment with the theme "Effect of seedling age on growth and yield of Nerica-4 rice variety".

We hope that all the participants learn a lot of knowledge through the worthwhile training and share the experiment results with farmers when they go back to their countries.

Comment from Mr. Peter Kiirya

Greetings and special thanks to JICA Uganda for giving me an opportunity to come to Japan and attend this wonderful rice training.

Rice production in my area has been relatively low but the consumption is very high leading to importation, yet there is enough land for rice growing.

In the training, we discussed a number of issues and covered aspects in improved rice cultivation including proper land preparation, which involves ploughing, paddling and leveling, proper seed variety selection, seed cleaning, soaking, disinfection, pre germination and nursery bed preparation and management.

This kind of training is very important because I have had an opportunity to engage myself in the experiment practically with all the required materials, resources and conducive environment.

I believe I will transfer such knowledge to my farmers of Bugiri district after getting results from the experiment and in so doing the production and productivity of rice will increase.