✅ Brief statement by Pirmah Rimdans at the 2023 SNRD Africa conference “Transform & Innovate: Future-proof Food Systems”, which was held in Somone/Senegal, 8-13 October.

Pirmah is a GIZ Livelihood Advisor in Jos, Plateau State, Nigeria for the project PEACECORE – Strengthening Capacities for Peacebuilding and Conflict Resolution in Nigeria’s North Central Zone. He primarily works on peacebuilding and social cohesion issues.

Transcript

My expectations for the conference were to first of all to learn. um the snrd is a sector for Learning and networking and so just to see what is going on in the food and nutrition sector in GIZ all the interesting work that’s being done by GIZ and to see what yeah to see what we could learn and take home and practice as well. my project is a TDA project so I think the expectations I had for my area was to come and see how food nutrition and security interacts with the fragility of TDA projects. um we more focused on conflict peacebuilding issues and to see whether um the snrd and the food and food and nutrition security how that plays into that as well so um the value that I got um that was added to me from this conference was especially in the areas of fragility and resilience. we are a tda project that works on fragility conflict resolution but we didn’t have a resilience analysis so at this conference I was able to understand what resilience analysis was and to even develop a template for resilience analysis that is very helpful I think it helps us to really take in the other indicators and factors that we might not have thought of initially as a TDA project to really put on snrd lenses to look at this problem and to include new topics like you know nutrition indicators and all of those so um like we’re talking about integrated approaches so I think it really opened my eyes to just how integrated these approaches could be starting with us being intentional about integrating our approaches I think the value that we added to this conference was the different perspective um a lot of people here are in the snrd network food nutrition climate issues while I’m coming from a transitional development assistance project that looks more about peace building, social cohesion issues. so just to present our version of things or how our context of things and to see you know when people talk about food nutrition and security is very technical very agricultural but to let people know that there’s also a sociopolitical side of security and food security how do you really secure farmers and farms and all of that and I think we added some value to open people’s minds and broaden their perspectives about what we’re talking about with food security if I had a magic wand I would create organic input on a large scale because I think that’s one of the major challenges we have um we’re too used to synthetic chemicals and fertilizers and the rest and yes we know we need to transition but how do we do that on that scale so if I had a magic one and I think that would be a major issue how do you provide organic inputs for these Farmers. so that they actually have a viable alternative that they’re willing to run with that is not expensive but that also give them good results.