Science and Technology Mailing List Archive

["Eli Minja" <<address removed>>]

Excellent contributions from Andy Hall, Berga Lemaga and Richard 
Gibson on innovation, capacity building and links amongst relevant 
and active stakeholders.  

In addition to this, there is need for links between related DFID 
projects or projects involving the same communities and scientists 
so that opportunities based on synergies and complimentary 
attributes of different activities and outputs can be reached in the 
shortest possible period.  For example, a field day organised by 
communities testing a nutritionally improved crop variety would 
benefit stakeholders in the farming communities, health, 
agriculture, education, private seed companies, traders, 
processors, radio and TV mass media, local leaders, government 
officials, researchers, extension staff, development NGOs and 
CBOs, etc.  This has worked well with an on-going bean IPM 
project on technology dissemination and promotion with small 
scale farmers.  

The participatory group approach and processes adopted in project 
activites have empowered both men and women farmers to share 
knowledge and exchange experiences.  Farmers have been 
learning from each other and group members are very happy to 
learn by doing.  Farmers' confidence in their traditional knowledge 
that they test together with improved technologies has been 
restored and group members are keen to train at their field and also 
to go out train other farmers and stakeholders.  The number of 
participating farmers and research groups have been increasing 
every season at all project sites. The capcity of participating 
farmers, national researchers and extension agents has improved 
substantially during the project period.  The partcipating 
stakeholders are gradually realising the benefit of participatory 
research, dissemination and promotion of science in agriculture.  

Participating farmers have interacted with different service providers 
and are seeking assistance to services that are beyond the scope 
of the project (credits, farm inputs, market inforamtion, feasible 
agroenterprises, training in various fields, study tours, new 
technologies for crops, livestock, soil fertility and water 
management, and environmental conservation).  In such cases the 
appropriate source of the services are solicited from partners who 
are then linked to the farmers.  In this way regional networks, 
national research and extension programmes, other international 
research centres, NGOs, private practitioners, other projects, local 
government offices, etc. have been involved in different communities 
with each contributing to the farmers' basket according to their 
development plans for the area.  

Farmers are organising themselves to form CBOs, credit and 
savings accounts, etc. as their own exit strategy but the entry 
point was bean pests in their fields.  At some project sites, the 
farmers are leading the research and the rest of the stakeholders 
are providing bakstopping services in case of need.  We view this 
as one of the ways forward to enabling the rural poor farmers to 
plan beyond their housholds so that they can better manage their 
resources.  

Eli Minja        


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