Sustainable Agriculture Extension Manual

Part 1

Technology development and extension

Participatory agricultural extension, 2

Meetings to raise awareness, 2
Institutional survey, 3
Wealth ranking, 3
Needs-assessment survey, 4
Learning about local practices, 5
Planning, 5
Participatory technology development, 5
Building capacity of local institutions, 6
Training for transformation, 6
Participatory monitoring and evaluation, 7
The Chivi Food Security Project, 7

Group extension, 10

Rules for groups, 12
Group extension for tree and coffee seedlings in Ethiopia, 13
Rainwater harvesting in Kenya, 14
A multi-purpose women's group in Kenya, 15
Agricultural extension in Zambia, 16
Community labour-sharing groups in Kenya, 17

Using farmers' knowledge about soil types, 19

Soil classification in Kindo Koysha, southern Ethiopia, 23

Participatory technology development, 24

On-farm technology testing, 26

Testing sweet-potato varieties in Ethiopia, 29
Testing planting-dates in Kenya, 30
Research on agroforestry in Kenya, 31

Farmer visits, 34

Organizing a field visit, 35

Participatory agricultural extension

Participatory agricultural extension consists of a basket of approaches to extension that involve "outsider" facilitators working closely with local communities. The farmers take on more active, participatory roles than in conventional extension. Many of the approaches described in the following sections and elsewhere in this book are parts of this approach; they can be selected, mixed and adapted as necessary to suit a particular situation.

Participatory extension is best used with smallholder farming communities. The communities are encouraged to identify their agricultural problems, prioritize them and seek solutions. Participatory extension aims to strengthen the community's ability to carry out these activities with limited assistance from outsiders. It does this by:

• Building the capacity of local institutions to plan and manage their own development.
• Conducting research and extension using a participatory technology development process, which develops technologies that fit the diverse, complex farming system of smallholder farmers (see the section on Participatory technology development).

While there are many different approaches to participatory extension, many follow the broad sequence outlined below. Many participatory rural appraisal methods are useful in various steps of the sequence. This book does not provide detailed descriptions of these methods, but further information on these can be found in the References and training materials section in the Appendices.

The guidelines below are based on the approach used in the Chivi Food Security Project in Zimbabwe (described later in this section). Clearly, other approaches could be used, depending on the local situation and the particular purpose of the project.

Meetings to raise awareness

Initially, the facilitator approaches community leaders to organize a community meeting. During this meeting, the facilitator introduces himself (or herself) to the community and describes the process, clearly outlining the purpose, the key steps, and the expected outputs. The facilitator should emphasize that "self-help" is a theme that will guide the process. He or she shouldnot make any promises that cannot be fulfilled.

Institutional survey

After the facilitator has been introduced into the community, an institutional survey is carried out over a 2-week period. This is designed to:

• Identify all institutions within the community, defining their roles and responsibilities.
• Conduct a strength, weakness, opportunities and threats (SWOT) analysis of key institutions in the community.
• Discover the strength of relationships between the community and key institutions.

Using a technique known as "wealth ranking", members of the community use their own criteria to define and identify different categories of wealth. A wealth-ranking exercise has several steps.

1. List all the households in the community.

2. Identify 2_4 key informants who know all of the households.

3. Write the name of each household on a small card (about 5 x 10 cm).

4. Ask the key informants to put the cards into different wealth groupings of their choosing.

5. After they have put all the cards into the wealth groupings, ask them to define the categories they have identified. Ask them to give objectively verifiable indicators (eg, "has house with metal roof") rather than subjective indicators (eg, "looks unhappy").

6. Record each household's wealth category on the card with its name. If the informants identified four groups, give the wealthiest group a score of 1, the second wealthiest a score of 0.75, the third 0.5, and the poorest 0.25. If the informants identified five groups, give them scores of 1, 0.8, 0.6, 0.4 and 0.2.

7. Repeat the process at least three times with different key informants.

8. Add up the scores given to each household by each of the key informants. Calculate the average score for each household, and then put them into wealth categories.

Needs-assessment survey

A needs-assessment survey aims to discover the needs felt by each of the different groups in the community. It can be conducted with the wealth groups identified above, or with other categories, such as unemployed youths or young couples (see the section on Gender and development).

1. For a needs-assessment survey, draw a random sample from each of the wealth categories identified in the wealth-ranking exercise. Select at least 10% of the total number of households.

2. Conduct semi-structured interviews with members of the selected households to gather information about the community and farming systems. If possible, record separately the impressions of men, women, elderly and youth; the data may help to identify specific activities for each of the groups.

3. Compile the results into a report describing the following:

• The purpose and methodology of the survey.
• The physical environment.
• The socio-economic context.
• The farming enterprises, highlighting constraints and potentials for development.
• The needs of the community as highlighted by the interviewees. Represent the interviewees' impressions of the importance of the needs they have expressed.

4. Prepare diagrams to shows linkages between the needs which have been identified. Share the results with the community during a community meeting. This allows the community an opportunity to comment on the findings before the report is finalized.

Learning about local practices

Participatory extension acknowledges that every community has problems and needs, and that local people are doing something about them. Therefore, the starting point for any agricultural improvement should be learning how the community's agricultural system is currently working.

1. Use guided group discussions and diagramming exercises to identify practices the community uses to address its needs, as well as technological gaps that may exist.

2. Conduct a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis with the community of each of the practices. Use participatory appraisal tools such as scoring, matrix ranking and group discussions to do this.

3. Recommend practices that have potential to fulfill the community's needs better.

Planning

Hold a series of planning meetings to help the local community to:

• Prioritize its needs (use participatory appraisal tools such as matrix ranking or scoring).
• Analyse its needs and the constraints it faces by identifying and elaborating on the causes and effects of the problems. A problem tree is a useful way of doing this.
• Screen current practices, indigenous technical knowledge and past experimentation for suitable methods.
• Assess possible solutions to the expressed needs and problems.
• Establish criteria for choosing the first activities to be carried out.
• Develop an action plan clearly spelling out what action is to be carried out, when, how, where, and by whom.

Participatory technology development

The needs-assessment survey informs and guides the process of learning about farmers' local practices. Using a participatory technology development approach, the facilitators and the local people are able to increase the range of technologies

available to smallholder farmers which would address their needs. PTD builds on the local knowledge, skills and experiences of farmers, but encourages them to experiment and be innovative, as well as seeking new information from other farmers and support institutions. Experiences are then shared with other farmers.

The following is a list of important methods (see the section on Participatory technology development for more information).

• Exposure visits to innovative farmers, research stations and training centres.
• Farmer-based experimentation, assisted by the facilitators to provide training on experiment design and analysis.
• Demonstrations in the community of specific technologies (these are best conducted by innovative farmers with support from researchers and extension workers).
• The use of farmer-to-farmer extension through field days, seed fairs, and farming competitions organized by the farmers themselves.

Building capacity of local institutions

Local institutions are identified as being the vehicle for improving agriculture. Efforts to strengthen local institutions aim to:

• Enhance the community's ability to plan and mobilize resources to implement their plan.
• Improve the institution's organizational structure to enable it to deal with new demands placed on it as the development process advances.
• Link the local community with a wider range of support institutions (eg, research, extension, local government).
• Encourage more active and wider participation of all members of the community.

Local capacity-building efforts are conducted by:

Providing training on the principles and practice of leadership and organizational management.

Promoting networking among community and support institutions.

• Using a training-for-transformation approach (see the box below).
• Holding meetings for project planning and review.

Participatory monitoring and evaluation

Project monitoring and evaluation activities should also actively involve community members. The criteria for assessing performance can be determined by the community itself. The role of the facilitator is to help the community members develop the monitoring and evaluation system and make it their own. Activities should be monitored on a continual basis; evaluation should be carried out at different times and at different levels. Annual group review meetings can be effective opportunities for participatory monitoring, evaluation and re-planning exercises.

The Chivi Food Security Project

The Chivi Food Security Project in southeastern Zimbabwe successfully uses the participatory extension approaches outlined above.

Background

Over 70% of Zimbabwe's 12 million people live in the rural areas. The majority are smallholder farmers whose primary source of livelihood is agriculture. More than two-thirds of these live in semi-arid regions with less than 600 mm of rainfall a year, frequent droughts, and poor soil fertility.

Land is generally divided into arable land used by an individual farmer, and grazing land which is communally used. Local institutions are too weak and poorly organized to take control and manage the common resources. The choice of technologies for smallholder farmers to enhance their productivity is limited, so food production is low and household food insecurity is rife.

Despite tremendous government investment in human and financial resources for agricultural research and extension, the smallholder agricultural sector has not greatly ben-

efited. The ineffectiveness of these institutions is at least in part a result of the top-down approaches they have used. Technological solutions are developed by researchers and passed on to extension workers. The extension workers in turn pass them on to smallholder farmers without having an adequate understanding of the farmers' priority needs and socio-economic situation. This has lead to "blanket" extension recommendations to farmers in very different physical environments. A classic example was the country-wide promotion of a contour drain that drains water away from the field: not a very useful practice for the very dry areas like Chivi.

The extension system did not acknowledge the importance of local knowledge, and saw itself as being responsible for promoting technologies which had been tested and proven by agricultural researchers. The realization of these weaknesses lead to the search for more effective extension approaches that generate location-specific and appropriate technologies in response to the needs and problems of smallholder farmers.

Project objectives

Within this context, ITDG conceived the Chivi Food Security Project to demonstrate how principles of participatory approaches can be applied to agricultural extension. The project started working in 1991 in the Chivi district of Masvingo province in southeast Zimbabwe. It has three main objectives:

• To help farmers' institutions to identify their priority needs and strengthen their capacity to bring about solutions.
• To work with local institutions to identify and develop technological options by building on their traditional knowledge.
• To influence government agricultural policies to take into account the production needs of smallholder farmers, by demonstrating the effectiveness of participatory approaches in enhancing household-level food security.

Key project partners include the Department of Agricultural Technical and Extension, the Department of Research and Specialist Services, and the Zimbabwe Farmers Union.

Results

In 1995, a participatory study of the project was conducted. It showed that the number of farmers participating in project activities had increased by over 200% from the original 320. Farmers ranked in the poorer wealth groups comprised about 60% of all project participants, with 34% of these occupying leadership positions (compared with only 21% before the project). The number of women holding leadership positions had increased from almost zero to around 35%.

As part of the project strategy, ITDG actively linked communities to a wide range of support institutions: training, research and extension institutions, as well as innovative farmers. Farmers then identified a range of technologies which they wanted to work with. The table on the next page highlights adoption rates of some of the technologies and emphasizes the wide range of sources the farmers have got these innovations from. —For more information, contact Blessing Bataumocho, ITDG_Zimbabwe.