 My name is Alan Duncan. I'm a scientist here at the International Livestock Research Institute and I'm going to be interviewing a couple of my colleagues who are organizing a workshop next week. So would you like to just introduce yourselves? My name is Tamayama Yuki and I work on gender at the poverty gender and development group. Hi, I'm Ranjita. I'm a researcher with Ilkri based in Addis Ababa and I work on innovation and livestock systems with the markets team. Good. So could you tell me what this workshop is about next week? The workshop is on gender and market-oriented agriculture and basically what we are trying to do is bring together organizations, research, development, policy makers, donors who have an interest on gender issues around markets to share experiences, learn from each other and see what the status is. Good. So Ranjita, these people just coming from Ethiopia? Where are they coming from? No, not really. The majority of the participants are from Ethiopia but then we are also invited people to share experiences from the region, East Africa but we also have participants from Asia, US as well so it's quite a diverse group. And what was the impetus for this workshop? Did it arise out of a project? Yeah, you know Ilkri has been implementing this project called Improving Productivity and Market Success in Ethiopia for the last five plus years and this was supported by the Canadian CEDA and the purpose of that project was to promote commercialization of smallholder agriculture working with priority crop and livestock value chains and making sure that women benefit from this interventions and the project was central to the project. So gender was a focus in that project and we tried a number of strategies and approaches to see how women could enhance their participation in this commodity value chains but also increase their access to services etc and we thought it's time to share some of those experiences and lessons. Good. So Jemima, I know that you've kind of been sitting with others in a closed room this afternoon talking about the process, some of the process. So tell us a little bit about some of the process that's going to be used in this workshop. We have some keynote speeches that will sort of set for us the scene going back to why gender has been the missing link in agriculture development and from that we then have a few experiences from Ethiopia from the IPMS project that Ranjita has talked about that then talk about some of the strategies that have been used to address gender issues. We also have a couple of research papers that talk about what has been the impact of this market and commercialization drive of agriculture on women, on nutrition, on food security and on other aspects. So basically we have a set of presentations but because we also have quite a diverse group of people who will be attending the workshop we have a lot of sessions where we'll be having discussions, sharing experiences, people synthesizing some of the strategies to really see what has worked, what has not worked, those strategies that have worked why have they worked and so on. We have a session where we are then inviting donors and policymakers to really discuss what does this mean for policy, what does this mean for donor programming and hopefully at the end of the workshop we're hoping that we will have a new paradigm shift in terms of how gender work in agriculture is funded that it actually becomes a central component of funding for agriculture development versus the current situation where there is a lot of marketing projects and gender is really just on the periphery and at most people really are just, you know, let's increase participation of women but having, you know, key strategies that will ensure that women actually benefit that it's effective participation and because really we've seen that if you engage women if women have access to markets and income it actually means better livelihoods for their whole families. Great, so you talked a little bit already about some of the outcomes which you anticipate this paradigm shift where donors are thinking about gender from the outset how are you planning to communicate some of the outcomes of this workshop to the wider world on us, Granjita? Yeah, we're going to come up with a policy brief at the end of it and a workshop report and things from here we will have a lot of the, you know, discussions upon blogs and then we are getting some people to be interviewed to get their perspective so there's going to be a wide variety of communication products that would be generated from this workshop. Good, so just a final question, are you ready? Yes, we are excited. It's actually a very exciting meeting to be able to bring together researchers, development practitioners policy makers, donors, all into one room to talk about gender and you know now we have our UN women so we are actually hoping a lot of this is a small contribution to a much bigger global picture, so be ready. Thank you.