The Agri-Women’s Development Trust will cease operations after delivering its remaining programme commitments to March 2027, general manager Julia Jones says.

Jones says the wind-down follows a 56% funding reduction since 2022 and fewer people going on programmes.

“It’s not really one reason. It’s been coming for a number of years,” she says.

An expression of interest process to move its programmes elsewhere was stopped over intellectual property, and the trust has gone into hibernation.

She rejects the idea the sector is left short.

“You’d argue that if there was such a big hole, we wouldn’t have had such a big decline in people doing programmes.”

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