Planning and Coporate Services

Cross-cutting issues
By 'cross-cutting issues', we mean the political, economic and social imperatives that we take into account when planning and implementing programme activities. We systematically incorporate research findings and new approaches for dealing with cross-cutting issues into these activities.

The cross-cutting issues CTA is currently focusing on are:

• Gender
• Social capital
• Information and communication technologies (ICTs)
• Youth

The first three were identified in our Strategic Plan (2001-2005); the fourth - youth - was added in 2003. Young people are the future of ACP agriculture but too few of them see the rural sector as the most profitable sector to join. As a result, rural populations in many ACP countries are ageing. CTA wants to help change this by making rural areas an attractive place in which to live and work, and to develop agriculture and agro-linked enterprises in a dynamic and sustainable way.

The inclusion of gender relates to the need to strengthen the profile of women in our activities - from selecting seminar themes, training participants, and identifying SDI beneficiaries, co-publication topics and PDS subscribers to choosing which local and national partners to support and ensuring that seminar and study recommendations reflect CTA's gender strategy. Including social capital as one of our cross-cutting issue relates to the emphasis given in the Cotonou Agreement to partnerships - with both formal and informal ACP groups. Social capital is about groups and the links between the people in those groups. Building social capital requires encouraging people to form groups and strengthening those that already exist. There is an Information Note on the subject, as well as a CTA-commissioned study, completed in 2003.

The importance we attach to ICTs is based our belief that the increased availability of information will improve decision-making in the ACP agricultural sector and that it is important to facilitate horizontal networking among ACP partners as well as vertical networking. ICTs offer great potential for information dissemination and networking, and we exploit this to the full in all our programmes. We also put a lot of effort into raising awareness of ICTs among ACP partners through specific activities, such as training courses, the annual ICT Observatory and the ICT Update magazine.