Features Energy Procurement
Funding awarded for study of Northern greenhouse tech

Funding from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada to study greenhouse use in Northern Canada has just been awarded. A total of 16 proposals were received.

 
The contract has been awarded to Agriteam Canada Consulting Ltd. of Calgary.

Ag Canada stated this summer that the chosen firm will produce “a comprehensive background study on greenhouse production for northern/isolated communities, including greenhouse design components, technologies, management, marketing and most importantly cost/benefit analyses.”

The required report will “highlight current knowledge and identify information gaps which will provide Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and partners a greater capacity to make well informed decisions when reviewing northern greenhouse project proposals in various locations across Canada. This research study will focus on the technologies most suited for northern latitudes, and remote/isolated regions of the country and should consider the overall sustainability factors of economics, environment and social.”

The Request For Proposals (RFP) closed August 21st 2012, and the funding ranges from $100,001 to $250,000.

From Agriteam Canada’s website:

Agriteam Canada was established in 1986 …and has since designed and implemented more than 170 projects worldwide in sectors including health and population; gender equality; education and education reform; agriculture and agribusiness; community development; governance and public sector reform; private sector development; legal and judicial reform; corporate social responsibility; and environment.

In 1991, Agriteam opened a second office in Gatineau, Quebec, which today is home to more than 20 Agriteam employees.

Roughly 200 full-time and support staff work for Agriteam, spread across the Calgary and Gatineau offices as well as field offices in Amman, Jordan; Cairo, Egypt; Lilongwe, Malawi; Calabar, Nigeria; Tamale, Ghana; Islamabad, Pakistan; Dhaka, Bangladesh; Beijing, China; Lhasa, Tibet; Manila, Philippines; Davao, Philippines; Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; Phnom Penh, Cambodia; and Piura, Peru.

The funding agencies we have worked with include the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and United Nations Agencies. We partner with numerous Canadian universities and colleges.

Agriteam Canada’s mission is to provide management and technical expertise characterized by:

teamwork, results-based project design, participatory methodologies, local input and ownership, and sustainability.

We aim to be catalysts of change and opportunity—not imposers of “solutions.” We aim to be partners in international development, contributing our best people and expertise to projects that will continue to create opportunities after we leave.

We firmly believe that for a development project to have a lasting impact, partner-country stakeholders and beneficiaries must claim it as their own. This belief guides every step of our project management approach.

From beginning to end, our projects encourage participation and collaboration. We involve developing country partners at the outset of projects to define goals and indicators and at regular intervals through progress reviews.

We have formed very successful project partnerships, both as lead firm and sub-consultant, with government ministries and departments, universities and colleges, non-governmental organizations and private sector companies.

We participate in numerous consortia to implement international development projects. Current and past partners include Agra Monenco, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, the Privy Council of Canada, the Government of Alberta, Health Canada, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, CARE Canada, World University Service of Canada, Partners in Rural Development, Bombardier, Centerra Gold and Continental Minerals.

At the core of our approach to project design and implementation is capacity development, which helps to build long-term sustainability into projects. We use a tried and tested four-stage capacity development model that establishes local ownership and consensus about the need for change, develops capacity in priority areas, ensures that capacity is applied to improve performance, supports internalization of changes for sustainability.

An example Agriteam Canada project (in Peru):

The Improving Basic Education Project will strengthen basic education in Peru by developing the capacity of educational administrators and service providers in the region of Piura. The project will focus on four key components: (1) strengthen the institutional capacity and human resources of basic education; (2) develop and facilitate the implementation of educational programs; (3) coordinate project activities in rural environments; and (4) mainstream gender and participation into the project. It aims to improve access and quality of preschool and primary education for rural children, and to produce a model for basic education in Piura that can be reproduced in other parts of the country. The project will work with the Dirección Regional de Educación (DRE), the regional arm of the Ministry of Education (MED), and the Agentes de Desarrollo Educativo and Coordinaciones Educativas, intermediary organizations (OIs) that work in support of the DRE.