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Hello everybody, I would like to react to both Paul Mundy and Tomothy woods. I am a development professional working with CARE India in the field of livelihoods enhancement. Paul Mundy is very right in pointing out that there is a great communication gap between Lab and land ie between the research work and its extension. Timothy Woods and his team at IDS are doing a great work in information dissemination through e-groups, but my concern is that there are few development practioners in India who are aware of these types of servies. Again whoever are aware of these types of services are the ones who are mostly at the project formulation level. I feel that there is a lot of communication gap in countries like India betwen the formulator and the implementer. I feel that organisations like DFID should also strive to bridge the gap between the two through some concrete measures like creating a strong link between the two. Sincerely yours Shakeb Nabi ----- Original Message ----- From: Timothy Woods To: <address removed> ; <address removed> Cc: <address removed> ; <address removed> ; <address removed> ; <address removed> ; <address removed> Sent: Wednesday, May 26, 2004 8:48 PM Subject: RE: Ensuring that clients benefit from agricultural research I am writing in response to Paul Mundy's earlier comments about ensuring that clients receive the benefit of research findings. Whilst this original comment was chiefly concerned with agriculture, obviously this subject concerns many other disciplines. I work at the Institute of Development Studies in Sussex. We have a large number of teams at this institute working to ensure that the key findings of academic research reaches policy makers, politicians and NGO's in LDCs. These departments are id21, BRIDGE, Eldis, Livelihoods Connect, BLDS, and GDNet. I work for id21, a free development research reporting service funded by DFID. Our mission is to communicate development research findings to policy-makers and practitioners in a jargon-free and concise format through our online database of research highlights, email newsletters and printed journals. We produce research highlights and articles on subjects including food security, forced migration, conflict resolution, refugee education and many categories of health research. Whilst not all research will be featured in our output, the response we have received from people in developing countries is very encouraging. Over 20,000 subscribers receive id21's email bulletins, and the same number receive our 'Insights' publications. We also place a great emphasis in writing our summaries and articles in a jargon-free, easy to understand style. For more information on any of these services, please visit our websites: www.id21.org http://www.ids.ac.uk/ids/info/index.html -----Original Message----- From: Paul Mundy [mailto:<address removed> Sent: 26 May 2004 12:51 To: <address removed> Cc: <address removed> Subject: Ensuring that clients benefit from agricultural research Colleagues: I'd like to return to the issue of ensuring that research findings reach the people who need them. Research institutes in the developing world put a lot of emphasis on publishing articles in scientific journals, and holding conferences and seminars. But the only people who can read the journals, or attend the conferences, are other scientists. Journals are mostly published in-house, so have very limited circulation, and are written in scientific jargon. Despite all the effort that goes into these journals and conferences, their direct contribution to development is close to zero. Whose job is it to translate from the research language into extension materials, mass media, and training courses? Research institutes tend to think this is the job of the extension agencies. But extension agencies simply do not have the capability to undertake this conversion process. The result is that a lot of good research ends up unused, sitting in desk drawers and on library shelves. Researchers, and research institutes, have little incentive to translate their findings into a form that normal mortals can understand. In Indonesia, for example, researchers are promoted according to a credit-points system. An article in a journal fetches 25 credits. An extension article yields a single credit. No wonder that researchers spend their time trying to split the findings of their latest series of experiments into as many separate journal articles as possible - instead of writing an overall piece summarizing the work in a form that extensionists and farmers might be able to use. Some research institutes train staff how to write for a popular audience. But they do little to help them find outlets for their work. Public awareness units of research institutions are rare, weak, and generally staffed by agricultural scientists rather than journalists or media professionals. Research institutions produce few publications aimed at extensionists, farmers or the public. They work very little with the mass media. Some suggestions for DFID: - Encourage national research institutions to reward researchers for translating research into everyday language. - Find ways to reward researchers for disseminating innovations, not just for developing them. - Put more emphasis on ensuring that research focuses on critical problems, and on ensuring that the solutions are implementable (and are implemented) by the people who need them. - Strengthen the units responsible for public awareness and extension liaison in research institutions. - Expand the target clientele for agricultural research to include NGOs and the private sector, not just extensionists and farmers. Paul Mundy development communication <address removed> www.mamud.com _________________________________________________________________ Express yourself with the new version of MSN Messenger! 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