farm-scale_research_design_Sept2012_day2-groupwork

= Developing a R4D approach at farm-level - consultation and writing workshop = Back to the event agenda
 * Info centre break out room, 13-14 September, ILRI Ethiopia **

=Group work - simulating a participatory R4D process= //In order to make this work more concrete, we decided to try out a case study to imagine how we could run a participatory R4D process. Participants split in two and worked on the same assignment.// //The assignment was based on the following case://

**Expectation of donor**: To develop and implement an approach to improve food security by intensifying agricultural production in more sustainable ways accounting for diversity of farming systems. The aim is also to target regions with similar agro-ecologies and similar agricultural production, which includes ~ 100.000 households. **Case study**: Cereal-based agro-ecosystem (rain-fed with one rainy season and soils with a tendency of N deficiency) with half of the population relying on livestock production to cover the cash/food demands. Out of the 1000 households, 20% are female-headed households. In the whole study area, 400 households are food insecure each year; half of these are female-headed households. Half of the head households had access to formal education, while only 30% are less than 50 years old. Households produce barley and horticultural products for the market, as well as butter while getting extra income by working on other farms or migrating to the city to send cash home. Most of the barley is sold to the local malt factory, while the wheat that is not consumed by the household is sold to the market that is more accessible to those crop growers compared to livestock keepers. Crop production ranges from 6 to 2 tons of cereal per ha depending on land, livestock and input access. Most of the communal lands have disappeared and only households with private grasslands can rely more on livestock-oriented activities (e.g. milk production, livestock marketing, etc.). In the few communal lands left, overgrazing is a major cause of degradation of grazing resources. Agricultural inputs are relatively expensive and there are few opportunities for off-farm jobs in the area or for urban employment. Still, income from daily labour is common in the region. Women do not participate much in public discussions when men are present. Their level of influence in intrahousehold decision-making is not known. **Project implementors**: 4 years of funding are available and you are expected to collaborate with national and local research and development partners. **Step1**  Introduce the project to the stakeholders. Understand the socio-economic and biophysical context, as well as the agricultural production of the study area. Identify major options and constraints for sustainable intensification in the study area. **Step2:**  Design a generic plan on how to tackle these potential constraints, including an assessment on the impact of this potential plan. **Step3**  Develop a generic approach on how to up-scale this to similar regions.

**Summary**:
 * // The idea of a technology market could be very useful: coming up with various options, letting farmers pick and choose, adapt technologies and come back to another (regional) market to share their adapted technologies. //
 * // We use a typology that addresses a) entry point and b) scaling up issues. //
 * // However we should not overlook institutional aspects: what are the legal, organizational and other issues that affect technology uptake? //
 * // Combining the technological and institutional aspects is core to Africa RISING's M&E work (team) //


 * Discussion**:

Group 1 presentation (Jens, Beth, Ann, Dave, Laurens, Naomi, Stefan)
What's new after the peer-review:
 * We need a sample of 1000 households to get an idea of whether we are not in a unique situation - and we zoom in on 400 households and gauge their food security constraints (access to land etc.).
 * We need to work on smaller groups and scale up - which complements your approach starting at wide scale.
 * We'll do a site selection per country related to AR objectives i.e. high potential areas and we'll look at target 40% of food-insecure people to replicate the work across the project countries. We'll check what can be adapted and scaled out.
 * We felt that the other group didn't work enough on institutional elements. So we focused on that: we'll work with groups in selected areas to look at food security constraints, root causes and potential options. This might include technical and institutional constraints and possible solutions.
 * We'll move on to a parallel process looking at institutional constraints and options to address these.
 * We can't just present technlogies in blanket baskets without solid M&E, without risk mitigation etc. We'd like to present a basket of technologies as a pre-phase and assess.
 * We'll like at legal, organizational issues that affect technology uptake.
 * We suggest an M&E process that monitors research and farmer perpsectives, issues of (dis)adoption, to generate a much richer understanding of how this works. Lessons from this can be documented across countries.
 * We'll look at data generated per country. The learning from each country may not be replicated but within countries it may be more easily replicated.

Q: These 400 HH you mentioned in your presentation, are these food-secure or food-sufficient? A: We assume there are stats available about food secure, very secure, less secure. Marrying these approaches is where we can get very useful insights. But for Africa RISING you might need to give a lot more direction as to the program's objectives. You need to have very detailed research goals. This is core to the M&E team's work.

Group 2 presentation (Diego, Tesfaye, Mariana, Barbara, Mateete, Frederic, Ken)
We did sthg more general:
 * We try to understand the context of our sites doing participatory analysis etc. to find out what's going on;
 * Then we do a quick survey based on generic indicators and indicators developed in step 1 - that should be quick;
 * We can link to general M&E indicators and local M&E indicators;
 * We can then develop a typology - whose objectives would be to a) better understand what we talk about and b) for potential up-scaling -
 * The contents of the typology would include major constraints e.g. land/labour constraints. It could be defined based on group 1's discussion about the basket opportunities - (but land limitations might be different across groups in the communities).
 * We should try and keep it simple when generating the typology - the problem is that generating the typology could become tautological: this group is different because of indicators that you decided upon before. --> Q: Is land and labour enough dimension to do what you suggest? <-- every approach is valid in the end locally - if you want to do it with comparable metrics across countries you need to adopt a more abstract approach using simple indicators.--> But doing farm research you could look at farm output indicators. <-- land, labour and production orientation is probably enough... From that you can generate typologies that are locally relevant.
 * Based on the typology, looking at the different CG centres and what they've tried, we could look at characterization and assess the 5-6 technologies we could bring to the farms as part of the basket of opportunities - then you can bring them to the market and farmers decide what tech they want to try. Then you do on-farm trial. Farmers decide technologies themselves.
 * After on-farm trial, farmers come with tangible results from the technologies and then we can look at institutions that might limit these technologies to ensure we're not going to the wrong sites.
 * Then we have local M&E which can be participatory, SPICED M&E, we can do local impact assessment and meanwhile look into the bulk of the research: what did they use, why, who did it, what were the results etc.
 * At the end, we go to a more regional market, bringing other farmers, dev organisations etc. and look at what tech worked or not. We need to include participation of women to ensure M&E takes into account these institutional arrangements.

Q: The way you describe the basket of opportunities: if you have large enough a basket you might not need typologies... In India there are BIG technology fairs. Farmers look at the technologies and pick what they want. --> But we might want to have a typology to look at who comes to the market. --> Typologies are helping __us__ to understand what works where, why and for whom. --> This typology can be useful if you know what the constraints are for the food insecure households - then you can label those technologies according to which are most likely to be appropriate for the food insecure. --> Livelihoods strategies are not just about constraints, they're also about choices. --> I'm not sure that the basket of technologies is the right way to go about it because farmers might overlook some other factors. Baskets of opportunities work for simple technologies not for everything. What are the consequences of using any type of technology to farmers' daily life may not be clear. That's where we introduced the idea of labelling here. --> We talked about markets with stalls and having interest groups. In the early phase we have interest groups and then you do your detailed work and later people are presenting modified technologies. The basket of options is vastly better than single options - but how do you create an environment in which people that would be isolated otherwise could still participate.

Livelihoods strategies will be used at the beginning.

Q: About the Africa RISING development expectations, we need some guidance about this. A: As far as I know, there was an expectation to come up with validated technologies. --> But the idea was also to look at integrated technologies e.g. crops, livestock, forestry etc. Those synergies were important in the research framework. We need to look at integrating technologies, strengthening community practices etc. We can pilot how we manage these processes and see how we can scale them up.