Student - February 15, 2007

Wageningen Alumni in Third Chamber

The Third Chamber for 2007 was officially inaugurated last Saturday, 10 February. Three former Wageningen UR students from Benin, Burkina Faso and Iran will serve in this think-tank on development cooperation. The start of this year’s session took place in Wageningen.

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The Third Chamber consists of citizens who are committed to issues concerning poverty and globalisation. Working in groups, they come up with proposals for improving international cooperation, and they present these at the end of the year to the Dutch parliament.

Of the 150 members of the think-tank, 30 come from outside the Netherlands. The southern members came to Wageningen ahead of the rest on Thursday 8 February to meet each other for the first time. Wageningen UR organised a programme in the morning at the WICC with lectures and workshops on projects in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and in the afternoon there was an excursion to the Blauwe Kamer nature reserve, which lay under a blanket of snow.

Wageningen UR is represented among the foreign delegates. PhD student Latifou Idrissou Aboubacary from Benin and MSc graduates Oblé Neya from Burkina Faso and Mazdak Sadat Mirramezani from Iran will give feedback on suggestions for proposals during the coming year. In addition, Fannie de Boer, a teacher at Wageningen International, and Maja Slingerland, a senior university lecturer at the Crop and Weed Ecology Group, are members of a panel of experts that, on request, will advise the members of the Third Chamber.