Goals of the Africa Great Lakes Coffee (AGLC) project:
1. Reduce antestia incidence (thereby reducing potato taste defect)
2. Demonstrate improved productivity that results when antestia is controlled.
The exciting start-up of the project is happening.
- MSU team is here from East Lansing
- Baseline instrument finally finalized (after something like 17 versions!)
- IPAR staff are working tirelessly to translate the 350+ line baseline survey into Kinyarwandan. Same thing is happening in Burundi at University of Ngozi to get a Kirundi version.
- IPAR is also hiring the enumerators who will start training tomorrow.
- Our Burundian research leads have hired their enumerators for Burundi.
- Next week IPAR will translate the survey manual into Kinyarwandan.
- Burundi's research leads will travel to Kigali, participate in the Rwandan enumerator training then replicate it in Burundi with their enumerators.
- Meanwhile, Aniseh, with the MSU staff, is working day and night to get English, Kinyarwandan and Kirundi loaded into the CSPro software for the tablets.
- After 2 days training, the pre-test of the instrument happens for 2 days.
- Friday, Dec. 11, we'll debrief the experience in the field.
- In another 7 days, we should be ready to start the actual baseline survey for the 2 weeks leading up to the holiday break.
