Entries categorized as ‘Scaling up’

Is radio on the road to extinction?

August 28, 2008 · 4 Comments

The proliferation of new ICTs must have pushed a colleague to declare that radio is soon going to be extinct and students need not bother with it.  A cursory look at how radio can be used to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) reveals a wide range of best practices being done globally.

Will radio for development soon be eliminated from the face of the earth and everyone else can shift to television or video?  Will it be more cost-effective to abandon radio and shift to TV for development goals?  Should we advise extension units or departments to exclude radio from the range of ICT choices? Please post your comments.

Categories: Development communication · Scaling up
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How an agricultural innovation can take off

July 28, 2008 · 10 Comments

Women farmers cultivating their rice field, Central Java

I just had a conversation with a colleague who had been to a workshop to plan the dissemination of seasonal climate forecast in the Philippines. To decide when to plant corn or rice, farmers will have to use the computer model developed by an ACIAR project assuming that they have access to a computer. Where computer facilities are not available for farmers, an alternative is to get hold of the simplified version of the computer model from PAGASA.

Supportive innovation system

My back-of-the-envelope advice to my colleague is: For the seasonal climate forecast model to take off, the structure must be in place that will facilitate its adoption by farmers.  PAGASA and the local government unit, which implements agricultural extension services in the Philippines, must be key partners in this innovation system.  The local technician will serve as the conduit between the weather bureau and the farmers. However, the municipal agricultural officer will function only if the municipal mayor approves of his/her involvement in this initiative. This could come about if the mayor discerns a “win” for his LGU’s involvement. If the activities are part of an agency’s mandate or mission, then partnerships can easily be established. The question often left unspoken is: “What is in it for an agency to be involved in the project?”

Benefits from innovation

Granted that the kinks at the agency level will have been ironed out and formalized through some memorandum of understanding, at the extension technician-farmer chain, it is necessary to demonstrate the economic benefits that will accrue to farmers when they use seasonal climate forecast to guide their planting decisions. How much money will farmers gain per hectare per season if they adopted the seasonal climate forecast to make planting decisions?

Risk aversion

Apart from distilling technical weather data into a usable knowledge product or simple decision rule, there is also the element of risk that farmers have to contend with. In the face of climate change, the risks can be quite high. Thus, farmers need to be able to weigh the benefits and the costs (risks) involved in the use of seasonal climate forecasts for their planting decisions.  As climate change has complicated the not-so-exact science of weather forecasting, how willing are farmers for this uncertain payoff?

Perhaps one way out of this is to organize farmers in groups to spread the transaction cost in accessing and using the seasonal climate forecast model. This may be done by tapping the facilities of the local government unit or the Techno Gabay program.

A parallel arrangement was done in the Mekong Delta to implement the “escape strategy” at the height of the brown planthopper (BPH)/virus disease outbreak in 2005-2006. Groups of farmers maintained light traps and the information was brought to the local plant protection center. The local technician analyzed the light trap data and made decisions when to plant rice to help farmers avoid the BPH.  Read more about the “escape strategy” …

Can the risks n using rainfall data to decide when to plant be reduced?  Will the benefit that will accrue to farmers outweigh the costs and risks involved? Please share your ideas by posting your comments.

Categories: Scaling up
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How to tap multi-stakeholder partnerships in scaling up initiatives

June 26, 2008 · 1 Comment

In 2006, I was on a Center-Commissioned External Review team to assess a program of a CGIAR institute which was implemented in several countries. After field visits, document reviews and talking to various people, I was totally improssed with the way that Institute has used partnerships as an approach to program governance and implementation. The Institute chose not to maintain expensive research laboratories in its headquarters but allocated donor funds to help key partners carry out their part of the research program. This distributive approach to fund allocation considerably strengthened partner universities and NARS.

In work that we have done in Asia, impact and multiplier effects were achieved only when our NARS partners were committed and had local ownership of the project. Multi-stakeholder partnerships has thus become our modus-operandi.

A scaling up initiative is essentially a research and development (R&D) project as it performs the twin functions of monitoring and evaluation and extension. To ensure sustainability, donors often require R&D projects to adopt multi-stakeholder partnerships as an approach in project governance and implementation. The range of partners could come from networks, donors, international research organizations, universities, national agricultural research and extension system (NARS), non-government organizations (NGOs), local government units, environmental organizations, health and nutrition sector, private companies, and men and women farmers.

Stakeholder meeting for radio soap opera project, Ho Chi Minh City

How to select project partners

Partners are often selected following established criteria of a project. For instance, in an integrated pest management IPM) project, the relevant partners would inevitably those from the Ministry of Agriculture’s plant protection department, universities, NGOs, local government, and farmers groups. However, partner selection may go beyond the written priorities for selecting partners. Often, there is a preference to work with strong partners who are committed and have demonstrated their ability to get the job done.

Despite the use of participatory approaches such as joint planning of collaborative activities, the major challenges in working through partnerships are ensuring that the partnerships are mutually beneficial, that there are no unrealistic assumptions and expectations about the project, and activities are carried out as planned.

How to get partner commitment

To enlist commitment of partners, it is important to find out their needs and expectations. This is best done informally. Once their requirements are known, it is easier for the project to work with them and get their commitment to the project and to commit to a timeline.

How to deal with dysfunctional partners

Partnership conflicts sometimes occur and affect project implementation. In extreme cases, a dysfunctional partners may have to be removed. One way to effectively deal with a problematic partner is to dilute his decion-making authority and eventually sideline him by increasing the number of project sites within the country. By doing this, it could foster competition which could result in better project performance and the problem is resolved without a loss of face.

Another way is to understand why the partners are not functioning and help them get back on track. A general pattern in partnership projects is to find partners working fine at the start of the project and later drop out. By understanding and supporting partners, decisions to drop them can be arrived at amicably. This will enable the partner to gracefully bow out of the project.

Categories: Scaling up
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How to be participatory in a scaling up project

June 10, 2008 · No Comments

The rhetoric on the value of participation isn’t just lip service. In our work in Asia, the most participatory projects tended to have more impact. Consider this– in the “Three Reductions, Three Gains” or “Ba Giam, Ba Tang” media campaign, the local governments of the Mekong provinces provided about US$345,000 additional resources to launch similar campaigns. Initial budgets of the pilot campaigns in Can Tho and Tien Giang provinces totaled only US$40,000. A specific line item budget for “Ba Giam, Ba Tang” was also written into the budget of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) to support its implementation in all provinces.

Developing prototype materials for "Three Reductions, Three Gains"

Plant protection partners discuss campaign strategy, Can Tho, Vietnam

To enhance multiplier effects we actively involved partners from the central and local government, university, research, extension and media, in planning, development, implementation, and evaluation activities. This was done through a series of participatory workshops with emphasis on establishing quality partnerships and local ownerships.

The workshops developed the strategies, the campaign slogan, “Ba Giam Ba Tang”, selected the media to be used and pilot sites, prepared and pretested the campaign materials. Implementation plans were also finalized by partners in the workshops. The process had encouraged transparency, friendship and cooperation and had served as an important vehicle towards facilitating scaling up extension. It has helped in multiplying the campaign pilot by leveraging local resources to increase spread thus increasing returns to modest project investments.

With the limited resources Asian governments are allocating to extension,  media campaigns, especially when implemented through multi-stakeholder partnerships, can be an effective option for reaching farmers.

“Three Reductions, Three Gains” key partners in Vietnam: Nguyen Huu Huan (vice director for plant protection, MARD), Ho Van Chien (director, southern regional plant protection center), Pham Van Quynh (vice director for agriculture, Can Tho province), Pham Sy Tan (agronomist, Cuu Long Delta Rice Research Institute or CLRRI), Pham Van Du (plant pathologist, CLRRI)

Categories: Development communication · Scaling up
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How to initiate farmer experiments

June 9, 2008 · 5 Comments

A few days ago, I gave a talk on participatory planning process, impact planning framework and farmer participatory research at a tree nursery project meeting. Because a colleague had wanted it to be a stakeholders’ meeting and get on with the development of their project’s scaling up plan, I suggested to clear the cobwebs first. The project leaders would need to address issues of partnerships and how to build trust among partners in order to reach project goals and ensure sustainability. In my talk, I stressed that farmer trials or in their case, tree nursery operators’ experiments are a prerequisite to scaling up. Perhaps because I said that without these trials, their project won’t fly, they acquiesced to that rule. But what the project staff worked on in the afternoon reflects a worrisome lack of conscious effort to wait until all stakeholders are on the same page before tasks are assigned and the project timeline is developed.

What is farmer participatory research?

Farmer experiments or farmer participatory research (FPR) is an approach, which involves encouraging farmers to engage in experiments in their own fields so that they can learn, adopt new technologies and spread them to other farmers. With the scientist acting as facilitator, farmers and scientists closely work together from initial design of the research project to data gathering, analysis, final conclusions, and follow-up actions. This step, sometimes known as innovation evaluation is essential for communication as well as for initiating diffusion. The main advantage of this approach is that farmers “learn by doing” and decision rules are modified on the basis of direct experience. To shape learning, interpretations of experience must provide information about what happened, why it happened and whether what happened was satisfactory or unsatisfactory. New information, technologies and concepts may be better communicated to farmers through the FPR approach.

Farmers meeting with agricultural extension officer in Suphan Buri, Thailand

How is FPR carried out?

1. Planning meeting

Initiate participatory experiments in collaboration with the local agricultural extension technician and the village head. In each village or district, invite 10 to 25 farmers. With the researcher acting as the facilitator, conduct group meetings with farmers. These half-day meetings can begin with general discussions about rice growing and related problems. Later, discussions should focus on the topic of relevance to both farmers and researchers. For instance, in pest management, the discussions may focus on the rice leaffolder, concerns about their damages, losses they could cause and methods of control. Encourage farmers to discuss whether the leaffolder needed control and whether anyone would volunteer to participate in evaluating a simple hypothesis.

Read more …

Categories: Scaling up
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How to “hang out” and learn more from farmers

June 6, 2008 · 2 Comments

In an earlier post, I promised to write about Jeff Bentley ’s guidelines for “hanging out” to get the most from farmers’ local knowledge. In 1999, Jeff presented these in a training course on ethnoscience techniques that we organized in Suphan Buri, Thailand. Here’s Bentley’s list for eliciting folk knowledge:

  • There is knowledge associated with each concept.
  • Do not ask leading questions; questions that suggest the answers.
  • Do not preach. Preaching is the number one cause of silence.
  • Share some information with local people, especially if they ask a direct question, of it is natural to slip in a comment.
  • Use interviews, group interviews preferred.
  • Listen to people without interrupting, just listen.
  • Do not make fun of people.
  • Hang out.
  • Have rapport and patience.
  • Use short questionnaires.

Sharing a meal with farmers in Central Java

To Bentley’s list, let me add these few tips to remember:

  • Keep an open mind and listen more. Do not push your own agenda (e.g. a special “tool” or concept you have developed which you think will solve farmers’ problems).
  • Make the farmers feel that you are truly interested in learning about what they think and do with regard to the topic at hand.
  • Be conversational. The field interview is some sort of directed story telling where you probe and pursue issues that come during the conversation.
  • Empathize - try to be on equal footing with farmers in order to establish rapport and build trust.
  • Although you may have more expertise, never engage the farmers in a debate nor pass judgment on their views or practices.
  • Always remember your objective in talking to the farmers – to learn what they are doing, find out their problems, identify the root cause, and perhaps explore how your “tool” could find a way into their crop management and decision-making.
  • Avoid questions that yield yes/no answers.

Read more ….

Categories: Development communication · Scaling up
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Scaling up adoption of improved tree-based options

May 29, 2008 · 2 Comments

The other day a colleague asked me to give a talk on “communication planning” for the benefit of his colleagues in a tree nursery project. I wasn’t too familiar with their project so I asked some key questions about it, such as:

  • What are the goals of the project?
  • What is the role of communication in the project?
  • How will communication be used to help achieve project goals?
  • Who are the stakeholders?
  • What prior work has been done to understand the stakeholders?

To facilitate wide-scale adoption and achieve impact, an R&D project needs to address the following points before a communication strategy can be designed:

  1. Brief description of the technology or recommended practices
  2. Impact or change desired: (e.g., improve the quality of X of all _______ by 35%; change farmers’ beliefs in ________management by 30%)
  3. Target audience: (e.g., 500 tree operators in ____ municipalities in _______ province adopting recommended practices ; 10,000 growers in _______ municipalities in ______ provinces can identify the characteristics of quality seedlings, demand quality seedlings, and grow such seedlings)
  4. Variables to be monitored: (e.g., tree operators’ cultural management practices, etc. )
  5. Methods to be used for each variable: (e.g., surveys of nursery operators and tree growers; focus group discussions; participant observation; assessments of attitudes)
  6. Consequences of change: (e.g., nursery operators grow quality seedlings, tree growers can recognize quality seedlings, reduced or zero tree mortality rates, reduced expenditure for planting materials, higher income, policy support to facilitate wider adoption - policy makers pass an ordinance that will require nursery operators to follow quality assurance checks as a requirement for a business license, etc)
  7. Change motivations: (e.g., save $$$; time; labor)

Stakeholder participation

The tree nursery project will have to take a few steps backward to do the following:

  • better understand stakeholders or intended project beneficiaries — what are their practices, reasons for doing them, resistance points. For this, the field staff will need to spend more time to “hang out” with the operators and growers. The agricultural anthropologist, Jeffery Bentley, has a practical to-do list for “hanging out” which I will share with you in another post.
  • create opportunities for nursery operators and tree growers to participate in defining the problem and finding the pathways to solve it.

ICRAF has carried out a farmer-led development and scaling up of tree-based options in Africa and it would be useful to learn from their experience.

Will appreciate your comments.

Categories: Scaling up
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Communication tasks to help achieve food security

May 23, 2008 · No Comments

As the rice crisis is being felt around the globe, I thought it is timely to think about how communication science can be harnessed to help achieve the long-term goal of food security. I have alluded to this in earlier posts, such as the one on the ACIAR scoping study on brown planthopper/virus disease management.

Key informant interviews with policy makers in Vietnam and a university president in Morocco revealed that agricultural development projects could have wide ramifications. Countries aspire for food security in order to achieve the ultimate goal of social stability. Whether the crop is faba bean in Morocco or rice in Indonesia or Vietnam, helping farmers produce enough food for home consumption and sell in the market remains a key objective. One of them noted, “Many farmers are the poorest of the poor. Without help, these rural residents will migrate to the city and cause more social problems.”

Rice farmer on way home after field visit, Central Java, Indonesia

Donors and policy makers may raise the key question: How can communication science be harnessed to help achieve food security? For a new initiative we are developing to help rice farmers in Asia reduce their pre-production crop losses, I was asked to list the essential communication tasks. I came up with the following:

  1. Design and conduct FGDs and farmer surveys to document baselines and post-intervention changes to monitor impact of the project outputs on farmers’ pest management decisions.
  2. Develop the capacity of national agricultural research and extension systems (NARES) partners in farm survey techniques, data processing, analyses, interpretations, participatory approaches, and scaling up processes.
  3. Assist NARES in planning, implementation, and monitoring of scaling up initiatives using a participatory approach in developing multi-stakeholder partnerships, designing and pretesting prototype communication materials, conducting formative and summative evaluation.
  4. Document and report all scaling up processes, activities and results across countries involved in the project in print (paper for publication in peer-reviewed journal) and niche blog.
  5. Participate in tracking the impact of project outputs.

What other tasks do you suggest should be included? Please post your comments.

Categories: Scaling up
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How to use diagnostic workshops to plan R&D projects

May 20, 2008 · No Comments

In our successful development initiatives in Vietnam, a common element that stands out is the use of a participatory approach in planning and implementation. This has been alluded to in earlier posts. To get our research and extension partners on the same page, our first step is to carry out a diagnostic approach. This approach aims to build quality partnerships among stakeholders and promote shared objectives to finding solutions to a given problem. The approach starts with a diagnostic workshop involving stakeholders.

In the workshop, analytical techniques are used to facilitate achieving shared views of the problem and objectives in research, extension, and policy. Descriptive techniques are also employed in the workshops to gain a common understanding of the management perspectives of the problem. These include the use of decision trees illustrating interactions between time and management options, pay-off matrices, and cause-effect analysis. Another important activity in the workshop is the on-farm dialogue with farmers to better understand their perceptions of the problem. Follow-up workshops are conducted to review and redesign research and extension activities.

A typical workshop consists of about 30 participants from research and extension with a mix of specializations in resource management (crop, pest, weeds, postharvest, water, etc.) and the social sciences. Wherever appropriate, farmers, NGO representatives, and local government officials are included. The main objective is to build a consensus and obtain a shared view of the problems and consequently develop a shared strategy for action. The workshop serves as the platform to introduce new ideas and methodology and recent research findings as well as to gain support from national agricultural authorities. Throughout these workshops, four basic points are used to guide the discussions:

  • Separate the people from the problems
  • Focus on interests, not positions
  • Generate options
  • Develop objective criteria and make judgments based on them

Read more …

Categories: Development communication · Scaling up
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How to plan an exit strategy for your development project

May 8, 2008 · 4 Comments

When we’re tied up with a successful development project, it is sometimes difficult to let go and allow our partners in the community to take over. Planning a painless exit strategy is a critical task for those of us involved in rural development. I asked my colleagues in the university to think about these questions with a promise to feature their answers on Devcompage:

1) Should we leave a successful project in the hands of our local partners?
2) How long should it take before we leave a development project and let our local partners take over?
2) What would be a fool-proof exit strategy?

My friend, Efren Saz, Director of the Institute of Strategic Research and Development Studies, emailed me his take on these questions. Here it is:

I think these questions ought to provoke many of us who claim to have worked in projects that involve communities.

1. On the first question: Should we leave a successful project in the hands of our partners? My answer to this is, if we could not leave it in their hands, then it is not successful at all. A successful project should be run by our partners be they communities, bureaucracies, universities, organizations, etc. This really brings us to the issue of ownership. Much has been said about this and I subscribe to the truism that for a project to succeed, it should be owned by those who have a stake to its success. If we start a project with this in mind, there is no issue about turning over because the project is theirs from day one.

Our role might be more intense at the beginning but it should not be confused with ownership. The project is owned by “them”–partners and as the days move on we recede from the picture until the project stage finally ends and the project is mainstreamed. This means our roles will have to evolve according to the life of the project until that time when, according to veterans, we become obsolete, meaning they won’t need us anymore. Now for the sake of argument let’s say we did not do the things we ought to do at the outset, there must be a turnover, yes by all means we should turnover the project to our partners. Fears that the project might fail after turning over to the partners is simply anchored on the elitist belief that “we” know better than “them.” Also, this fear is probably a product of a realization that we may have been remiss in “preparing” the “natives” for “self rule.”

A side issue on this is about the partners’ response. The many laments that I heard about this is: Now that there is no more foreign assistance (read: budgets, vehicles, travel, supplies, conferences, honoraria, etc) they’re going to give the project to us. How can we assure the same level of intensity and commitment when we don’t have the same level of resources at our disposal? Well, you just have to leave it to your partners one way or the other. You’re not going to stay in the project forever, they are.

2. How long before we leave? I say there is no fixed time table because the problems and milieu vary. However, projects usually have a life because they are supposed to deal with specific problems. Some take three years, five years or more. I believe the benchmarks that we had set in the beginning ought to tell us if we have achieved our goals and should also tell us whether its time to go.

3. What is a fool-proof exit strategy? I’ll start by asking the question “is there a fool-proof exit strategy? I have read somewhere that one failure of management of any project is failure to end the project whether it is successful or a failure. If it failed, we want to continue until we succeed. If it succeeded, we must continue because “sayang.” I must confess that in my previous and current involvements, we never have yet exited a project in an organized, systematic way.

In one, I remember, the exit was kind of unceremonious because the project was left hanging in the air with the loss of support (financial), the many threats by some quarters (rebels) and the general failure of the many initiatives under the project. I believe we committed the usual mistake of hatching ideas by ourselves
and bringing these to the “people” because it is “good for them.” We thought we knew what was good for them (and they didn’t). It was “our” project which we designed for “them.” From hindsight, we could have prepared ourselves before even thinking of preparing them (social prep). WE could have disabused ourselves first of the idea that we knew better. We could have asked them what they needed and how best could these be met. We could have employed our skills in SWOT, problem tree analysis, the whole RRA/PRA tool box but we thought we knew better.

Going back to the original question, what is a fool-proof exit strategy? I think, the first steps become part of the exit strategy already. When you let them become owners from day one, when methodologies are systematic and clear, when goals are clear and achievable, when lines of authority are clear, when commitments are firm, you will have formulated already your exit strategy. Fool-proof? Maybe maybe not.

Thanks to Efren Saz for this post.

Categories: Development communication · Media campaigns · Scaling up
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