CRISP also participated in “Reaching the Millions: A face to face workshop on Rural Advisory Services” held at Hanoi during 2-7 March 2015, Hanoi, Vietnam.
The workshop is hosted by the A&FS Network and organised by HELVETAS Swiss Intercooperation in collaboration with the Global Forum for Rural Advisory Services (GFRAS) the Asia-Pacific Islands Network for Rural Advisory Services (APIRAS) and the Network for Agricultural Extension in South Asia (AESA). All presentations, summaries of the sessions and main workshop outputs are made available here
The workshop came up with the “The Hanoi Statement on Rural Advisory Service Systems” which was endorsed by 68 RAS experts and practitioners that participated in this workshop”Current RAS systems are pluralistic: A multitude of service providers interacts with agricultural producers, and these service providers are funded from various sources. The purpose of the Hanoi statement is to increase the capacity of future pluralistic RAS systems to reach out to a large number of agricultural producers (“Reaching the Millions”) in a poverty oriented, ecological, and sustainable way. To this aim, the statement describes identified core aspects of RAS systems and defines the factors that are supporting them. Based on the core aspects, it provides recommendations on how development cooperation can contribute to strengthen RAS systems”.