Addis Ababa: Ethiopia needs to modernize its marketing strategies and enhance farmers' access to market information in order to boost income from sesame production, according to the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA). The International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), in collaboration with the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), hosted a workshop titled 'Stakeholder workshop on innovation scaling preparedness and strategy.' The event is part of the CGIAR Initiative on Rethinking Food Markets and Value Chains for Inclusion and Sustainability which aims to transform the food sector by scaling innovative approaches to improve efficiency, equity and sustainability, and generate more jobs and better incomes for youth and women. The CGIAR Initiative provides evidence on the innovations, incentives and policies most effective for creating equitable income and employment opport unities in food markets while reducing the environmental footprint from the agrifood sector. The two days workshop brought together local and international experts involved in sesame production, marketing, and consumption as well as pertinent stakeholders from across the sector. Principal Agricultural Market Economist at International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), Girma Kassie said sesame is Ethiopia's leading oil crop and the second most exported agriculture commodity. However, low adoption of technologies, weather variability, poor finance and infrastructure, low crop diversity in the sesame growing areas, among major constraints of sesame value chain the country. Therefore, he elaborated this workshop focuses on developing a strategy on how we can scale up the innovations that we have been testing over the last three years in northwestern Ethiopia. 'We are going to talk about what our progress we have made, and what ways of scaling up would be useful to think about impact at farmhouse alone, in terms of the price they receive, market participation, in terms of the quantity they take to the market as well as their income as well,' he stated. Moreover, Girma pointed out that we have been providing training for farmers on market information in collaboration with pertinent stakeholders. 'The experiences so far show that farmers are quite happy with the information they have been receiving, and our monitoring surveys have shown that farmers are really interested in forming their own groups for collective action, and that's meant for marketing.' Senior Program Manager in the Markets, Trade, and Institutions Unit at IFPRI, Rajalakshmi Nirmal on her part said we have been working on the rethinking food markets initiative for the last three years. 'Our objective is basically to work with smallholder farmers and help them with some innovative means to improve their marketing strategies on how they can get better prices for their sesame,' she added. She stated that sesame is very im portant for Ethiopia's economy, but the farmers face a lot of problems in terms of lower productivity and volatility in global market prices. Hence, in the workshop today, we will see how to address these two challenges that smallholder farmers are facing and how we can help farmers with the market information in terms of the demand in terms of prices. Senior Researcher Innovation Scaling at International Water Management Institute, Thai Thi said this workshop is one of the, in a series of stakeholder engagement activities, we try together with stakeholders to assess and identify scalable innovations and see how to scale it. We see scaling up innovations by cooperating with stakeholders and learn from success and failures into the current designs of innovation, she added. In this regard, the researcher stated that 'researchers have multiple roles in this process. We are knowledge partners. We share knowledge, insights and expertise in the areas and innovation.' Source: Ethiopian News Agency