News

LRT was visited on December 11th by two fellows of the Gender Equality Training (GET) Programme and its Project Manager, Dr. Annadís Gréta Rúdólfsdóttir.  The fellows of the GET programme are Latifa Hamidi and Hafiz Noori, both from Afghanistan. The LRT is very pleased with being able to share its experience with the GET programme and to meet with their first fellows.

A workshop to review and enhance the curriculum of the Land Restoration Training Programme was held at the Agricultural University of Iceland on December 4th and 5th.  Around 25 people attended the workshop and shared their experiences of the LRT programme and participated in fruitful discussions on how to enhance the current programme.  Many good ideas germinated during the workshop and will be developed further and built into the programme.  Ingrid Gevers from Wageningen International in the Netherlands facilitated the workshop and assisted with curriculum development.  

Welcome to the new LRT website!  Here you can get an overview of the programme, its objectives, its history, the fellows that have attended the programme, and more.  You can find specific information about admission to the programme, how fellows are selected and from what countries.  Individual projects of each fellow are also accessible here.  The latest news will be posted here to keep you informed about our work.

Six LRT fellows who participated in the second full six month training programme graduated on October the 1st 2009.  This is the third graduation since the initiation of the LRT programme, but the first fellows where offered a seven week training programme in 2007.  This year the fellows came from Ghana, Ethiopia, Uganda, Mongolia and Uzbekistan.

Dr. Hafdís Hanna Aegisdóttir became the new Project Manager of the LRT programme on April the 1st 2009.  She has been the Assistant Project Manager since April 2008 but will now replace Dr. Ingibjörg S. Jónsdóttir, who has been the Project Manager from the beginning of the programme.  Ingibjörg S. Jónsdóttir is now a professor in ecology at the University of Iceland. You can read more about the academic background and work experience of Hafdis Hanna here.  

An article about restoration of degraded land was published in the newspaper Namibian on January the 22nd.  In the article, two LRT fellows of the 2008 programme state the problems of land degradation, climate change and loss of biodiversity in Namibia.  They talk about how the Land Restoration Training Programme, which builds on the Icelandic experience of landcare, taught them that the root causes of land degradation are very related around the world although environmental problems can be very different from one place to another.  They also talk about the importance of involving local people in restoration and landcare work and to use bottom-up approach to improve success rate of projects.  You can read the whole article here. Taimi Sofia Kapalanga and Emily Mutota from Namibia, with Bolormaa Baatar from Mongolia in the middle, in the field in Iceland