“SAFBIN learning and practices were spread across all our social development institutions in Madhya Pradesh”, Fr. Kiran, Director MPSSS, stated in the inaugural session at the annual SAFBIN review meeting held at Xidas in Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh, from March 27-29, 2019.

The annual review was attended by about 31 people including village resource persons and district programme officers of the districts of Sagar, Mandla and Vidisha, Caritas India team, the directors from JDSSS, MVSS and MPSSS, and South Asia Regional Enablers including the Caritas Switzerland country director and programme manager.

The presentations were held around achievements against the targets of the first year of the programme, finance, options for the farming system models, as well as discussions on the concepts and plans for the second year, namely research, entitlements, value chain and data management were finalised.

During the meeting, the village resource persons shared the various activities conducted at the village level in a World café model style. Moreover, the district programme officers of the respective districts presented achievements, learning and challenges during the first phase.

Major achievements of the first year were:

• Recruitments and programme launching
• Formation and strengthening of SHFC and district farmer’s forum
• Participatory rural appraisal and baseline data collection is completed
• Capacity building of the team and SHFC’s
• Awareness campaign around nutrition
• Team has already started helping the community to mobilise the government schemes and entitlements

A major discussion point during the meeting was the integrated farming system (IFS), which is the core part of action research element in the programme. Information generated from baseline data and participatory assessments were used to analyse different farm components and derived connections. The districts shared their draft IFS models and were then in plenary discussed in depth. The team has worked out a detailed schedule to generate inputs and information from the community to finalise these models. In this context, the national coordinator, research officer and value chain officer presented first analyses of the baseline data.

The SAFBIN-team is energised and getting all set to initiate the on-farm adaptive research around the integrated farming systems approach from the forthcoming agricultural season.