Dear all, I hope this finds you well. I just returned from a 10-day visit to our Rare Vrienden Foundation ( www.rarevrienden.org ) in Kilifi, on Kenya’s coast. Alongside some Easter moments on the Indian Ocean with our Kenyan friends, we spent most of our time visiting a number of our ongoing programs. We met rural women involved in our poultry project, opened a computer classroom at Nyari High School, and connected with girls in our high school sponsorship program. One of t

Exploring the volcanic soils of Ethiopia's highlands and how the PIP approach puts farmers in the driver's seat for sustainable agricultural change.

Dear friends and visitors, Eric Smaling along the historic canals of Amsterdam. Welcome to my website. It may be a bit weird to mount a personal website at the age of 68, as my demise is much closer than the start of my career. Being from The Netherlands where it is a virtue to be ‘normal since that is crazy enough’, it was never my plan but my Kenyan friends convinced me that my life has been sufficiently interesting to justify a website. And since I love them so much, I c