CUBAO, Quezon City—It is often said that farmers require continuous training to enhance their farming skills and capabilities. The same can be said for agricultural extension workers as they also need continuous education in their own field to better assist our farmers.

In support to this, the Agricultural Training Institute (ATI) invited 37 technical staff from local government units (LGUs) and state universities and colleges (SUCs) of Luzon and Visayas to a five-day training on improving proposal-writing skills.

This training for agriculture and fishery research, development, and extension stakeholders, entitled “Developing Winning Project Proposals”, served as an avenue to share cutting edge information, knowledge, and skills to improve the capacities of participants in project development and resource generation.

Discussions included project proposal writing and the guidelines and formats of funding institutions, how to access funds from the ATI through the grant system, and project cycle management. Group dynamics were also conducted for formulating SWOT analysis, and problem and objective tree based on different scenarios.

"As an extensionist and professor, everything I learned from this training will be used in developing winning project proposals for the benefit of our farmers," said Emilio Cebu, an extension coordinator from Samar State University.

At the end of the training, the participants were able to draft one project proposal each and accomplish their action plans. Approved proposals will be funded under the Extension Program for Agriculture and National Development or ExPAND.

The training was conducted last March 5-9 at Eurotel-Vivaldi Residences, Cubao in this city. A second batch of participants from LGUs and SUCs in Mindanao was trained last March 19-23 in Davao City.