The first day of the NUSTALGIC trainer-of-trainers workshop set a solid technical foundation. After a brief opening from the ICARDA team, we spent two hours deep in the agronomic management of neglected and underutilized species (barley, lentils, chickpeas, fava beans, and grasspea) understanding why these crops hold such promise for dryland farming in Morocco. 

The morning wrapped up with a hands-on look at small agricultural equipment: seeders, cultivators, a legume combine harvester, a pellet press. The message was clear — the right tool, well chosen and well used, can transform a small farm's daily reality. 

The afternoon broadened the picture further, with the American University of Beirut walking us through soil health indicators and the specific role legumes play in restoring fertility, followed by the High Atlas Foundation presenting water harvesting techniques that modernize ancestral systems like terraces and pseudo-khettara structures. 

The approach was entirely in keeping with HAF's deeply rooted philosophy: that communities themselves are the best judges of what they need, and that lasting change comes from building on local knowledge rather than replacing it. Not reinventing the wheel, but honoring and upgrading what already works.

The second day shifted the register entirely. The DEFR team led a three-hour session on gender integration that was one of the most thought-provoking experiences of the two days. Working through the Reach-Benefit-Empowerment-Transformer framework, we were pushed to honestly examine who we actually reach in the field, and whether women are truly benefiting from ,or simply present, alongside the interventions we deliver. 

The practical exercise made it real in a way that a lecture never could and a healthy debate followed. After the coffee break, the Crédit Agricole du Maroc took over with a session on sustainable income opportunities: case studies on profitable NUS production models, and key messages on financial literacy that gave our technical knowledge an economic backbone it had been missing.

The workshop closed with a role-play simulation where we tried to hold the technical, gender, and income dimensions together simultaneously in a mock farmer exchange. The final planning session, mapping out the upcoming farmer meetings in Rabat, Meknès, and El Hajeb, turned everything abstract into something concrete and imminent. Stepping back, what struck me most is how fully NUSTALGIC aligns with the High Atlas Foundation's core approach across every dimension of the project: communities driving their own development, women recognized as central agents of change, local knowledge treated as a foundation rather than an obstacle, and capacity-building placed at the heart of everything. This is not a project that delivers solutions from the outside, it is one that grows them from within.