NEW PID Training Ideas and MODULES

“NEW”PID training ideas and MODULES

Experiences of Prolinnova Partners

2005-2010

Version 3

Edited by Jean-Marie Diop and Laurens van Veldhuizen

ETC EcoCulture, The Netherlands

January 2011

Table of Contents

• Title 1.1 : History of research and extension since the 1960s

• Title 1.2: Concepts of farmer innovation

• Title 1.3: Basics about PID

• Title 6.1:Explanation of PID steps and methods

• Title 6.2: Identifying local/scientific innovations

• Title 6.3: Documentation/Study of farmers’ experimentation/local innovations

• Title 6.4: Joint criteria for selecting useful innovations for disseminating or for developing

• Title 6.5: Designing/planning experiments

• Title 6.6: Participation of men and women

• Title 6.7: Practice in the formulation of experiment sheets and drawing of the activity plan

• Title 6.8: Analyzing and evaluating results of PID experiments

• Title 6.9: Promoting/Disseminating results of PID experiments

• Title 6.10:Identifying/Producing media to document and spread local innovations

• Title 6.11: Participatory monitoring and evaluation of PID trials

• Title 6.12: Monitoring and evaluation the PID process

• Title 7.1: Institutionalizing, scaling-up and sustainability for PID

• Title 7.2: Financing local innovation and PID processes

• Title 9.1: Developing PID training materials

• Title 9.2: Creative Methods and Techniques in Facilitating PID training

Introduction

Since 2005, a large number of capacity building eventsin Participatory Innovation Development (PID)have taken place in countries that are part of the Prolinnova network. These often used resource materials from the international PID training of facilitators’ workshops. But in organizing country training events new modules and training materials were developed. This document collects some of these “new” PID training modules or ideas.

The purpose of the exercise therefore is to ensure that PID training experiences over the last past six years are not lost but made accessible for other PID trainers. The present document presents the ‘new’ ideas, materials in their actual forms, describing how the training sessions were done in practice so that other PID trainers can be inspired to use them.

Although a lot of training materials are available from country programs (CPs), there are not many trainers who actually seem to develop tailored material for in-country training. In some cases they may do this in local languages, difficult to access for inclusion here. Most CPs borrow from existing material and from the material given to them at PID trainings of facilitators (PID-ToFs).In general we therefore continue to encourage trainers to use their creativity for developing and/or adapting training materials to meet the specific needs of the country.

We hope that the ‘new’ PID training ideas or modules included here will be a source of inspiration for PID trainers in PID and beyond in orderto keep the PID pot boiling through their training events.

1. The facilitator will give a guide about the group work/assignment
2. Participants will form small groupsof 4-6 participants and work out the major approaches used in the last 50-60years. Participants characterize each approach and present their findings in plenary sessions.
3. The facilitator will present slides on historical evolution of research and development (see handout 1 and 2 below).
4. The facilitator raps-up the discussion

Handout 2

Handout 3

Concepts of local/farmer innovation

What is local/farmer innovation?

Local innovation refers to the dynamics of indigenous knowledge, which is the knowledge that grows within a social group, incorporating learning from own experience over generations but also knowledge that was gained at some time from other sources but has been completely internalized within the local ways of thinking and doing. Local innovation is the process through which individuals or groups discover or develop new and better ways of managing resources, building on and expanding the boundaries of their indigenous knowledge. The innovations may be not only in the technical but also in the socio-institutional sphere. Especially in drier areas where livelihood systems are highly vulnerable to climatic risks, successful local innovations often involve new ways of gaining access to or regulating use of the natural resources, new ways of community organization, or new ways of stakeholder interaction.

Local innovation through informal experimentation has always been taking place in all parts of the world, but it is only recently that increased attention has been given to identifying and documenting the innovation process and the innovations. It is not sufficient, however, just to record and perhaps even scientifically validate local innovations. In rural development, farmers[1], development agents and scientists are challenged to move beyond the existing innovations that farmers have been developing with their own resources, on the basis of their own knowledge and creativity. The challenge is to develop these ideas further, in joint experimentation, in ways that integrate also relevant information and ideas coming from outside, including formal research. This means that the agenda for research and development (R&D) grows out of the ways in which rural people are already trying to improve their livelihood systems. Their ideas and motivation drive it.

Why is it important to promote local innovation?

In the past, mainstream rural development efforts were focused on technical interventions aimed mainly at controlling or manipulating nature through the use of external inputs. In the South, these efforts generally failed to give poor families more secure access to food and to improve their livelihoods. While there were some successes, these were limited to specific agricultural enterprises such as coffee, tea and dairy farming in more humid areas. Most of the introduced technologies were inappropriate for poor farmers and other resource users in marginal, rain fed areas such as the dry lands and mountains, which often lack the necessary conditions for the success of such technologies, such as good marketing infrastructure.

In such marginal settings, the key ingredients for sustainable resource management are not external inputs but rather labor, knowledge and local management capacities that enable people to manipulate skillfully the local resources. Most rural development efforts have failed to mobilize and enhance these “internal inputs”. The dominant approach to research, extension and education for rural development still follows the pattern of “transfer-of-technology”. This is based on the assumption that scientists create knowledge, packaged and spread by extension services and to be adopted by local people. It is an approach that effectively squelches local creativity and innovation.

Over the last two decades, however, some examples of effective approaches to R&D for sustainable agriculture and NRM in marginal areas have emerged. They try to capitalize on the knowledge, creativity and management capacities of local people and to combine indigenous/ local and external knowledge in joint exploration and experimentation. Some examples are the Campesino-a-Campesino movement in Central America and the Indigenous Soil and Water Conservation (ISWC) and Promoting Farmer Innovation (PFI) projects in several countries in Africa. These approaches involve discovering and recognizing what local resource users are trying to do in their own development and experimentation efforts, and building on these initiatives. They promote participatory action learning by resource users and supporting agencies in order to develop the local innovations and complementary techniques further. The impact of a local-innovation approach to R&D in improving the livelihoods of rural people and strengthening their organizational and self-help capacities has been documented, for example, in Farmer Innovation in Africa, a joint publication of the ISWC and PFI projects.

Identifying local innovations is a first step toward changing the way formal researchers and development workers regard farmers and interact with them. The purpose is not primarily to be able to disseminate local innovations in a transfer-of-technology mode of extension - picking out what scientists consider to be the "best" solutions that are most widely applicable. This type of approach is not suited for the highly diverse environments in which most small-scale farmers live. Local innovations are locally developed to fit a particular biophysical and socio-economic setting and usually cannot be transferred in exactly the same form to other settings. However, the documentation and wider sharing of local innovations can provide ideas and inspiration for others to do their own experimentation and to adapt new ideas to other settings.

Another major reason for giving recognition to the inherent innovativeness of farmers is to provide a basis for more genuinely participatory R&D. It starts off the partnership on a completely different footing than approaches that start with bringing external technologies for farmers to test. From the outset, value is given to local people's knowledge and creativity. They are seen as partners with something to offer, not just to receive. A positive approach that starts from (but is not confined to) local ideas, that focuses on local people’s strengths and explore the particular opportunities open to them – rather than dwelling on their weaknesses and problems – is key to stimulating innovation.

Entry point to Participatory Innovation Development

Local innovations offer entry points for linking indigenous knowledge and formal scientific knowledge in community-led participatory R&D. For development agents and scientists, learning to recognize and value local innovation and informal experimentation by farmers is an important step towards engaging in what is now being called Participatory Innovation Development (PID).

These is a more comprehensive term than Participatory Technology Development (PTD), an approach that has been promoted fore many years by NGOs and has become increasingly widespread, also within international and national research centers. Basically, the activities involved in PTD are:

• getting started (getting to know each other);
• joint analysis of the situation – the problems and opportunities;
• looking for things to try to improve the local situation;
• trying them out in community-led participatory experimentation;
• jointly analyzing and sharing the results; and
• Strengthening the process, often through improving local organization and linkages with other actors in R&D, so that the PTD process will continue.

A closer look at local innovation in agriculture and natural resource management (NRM) has revealed that it goes beyond “hard” technologies to “soft” innovations such as in marketing, farmer organization and co-management mechanisms. The term Participatory Innovation Development (PID) embraces this broader understanding of joint R&D, and is now increasingly being used instead of PTD.

PID is not only or even primarily an approach to research but rather an approach to development. Most of the PID that is happening today is being done by farmers together with development agents – usually without the involvement of formal researchers. This should be encouraged, as it will not be possible for formal research to work together with the millions of small-scale farmers in remote, marginal and highly diverse areas throughout the world. In such areas, "blanket" solutions cannot be applied. Local experimentation is necessary to see if new external ideas – whether from other farmers or from formal research – can fit the local setting. Moreover, conditions are constantly changing, so all farming communities need to be able to adjust to these changes. Therefore, local innovation by farmers must be a never-ending process. PID strengthens this process and, in most cases of PID, the main partners of the farmers will be development agents in governmental and non-governmental organizations.

The local-innovation approach is an entry point to PTD that starts with looking at what farmers are already trying, in their own efforts to solve problems or grasp opportunities they have already identified. The joint situation analysis by community members and outsiders is based on these concrete examples. Local innovations become foci for community groups to examine opportunities, to plan joint experiments to explore the ideas further and to evaluate the results together. This process, around concrete joint activities, helps to strengthen community organization for development. Formation of local research groups and eventually local stakeholder platforms (e.g. involving farmers, local leaders and government authorities, development agents, and teachers in nearby schools) are basic steps in building up effective and equitable partnerships for R&D at higher levels - in the district, province, country, region and the globe.

Who are innovators?

It is often not easy to identify and clarify farmer innovation or innovator as the term is understood and perceived by different observers [researchers, practitioners, policy makers, fellow farmers etc] quite differently. The major source of misunderstanding and confusion is the fact that some people do understand innovation like an ‘invention' or discovery of something brand new techniques or tools. Such an attitude is precisely developed as a result of the traditional or background knowledge which most of us have about scientific innovations. In the conventional science world, a product to be recognized as innovation, need to be a new discovery. That newness is not only to a given locality but also to the world. Those who try to see farmer innovation from the same perspective could be easily trapped in the middle of the confusion. The other important source of misunderstanding is the meaning we attached to "adoption”. Adoption of technologies that could take place as a result of the intervention of outsiders, through organized agricultural trainings or extension services has to be seen critically. According to Rogers, those farmers who are in the front line to take up new technologies introduced by extension workers are regarded as innovators. But, in reality are these same people; the farmer innovation approach is concerned about? No, they are not. Farmer innovators are not the classical adopters of technologies, which are brought in to the system by extension workers. They in fact some times adopt but they always try to adopt the technology to their own reality, through making essential changes that deem necessary. They have the courage and commitment to make changes on what so ever they learn from others and make it more realistic to fit in to own situations. This is indeed only one manifestation of who innovators are but the other and most important characteristics of innovators is, that they do work on IK and make it more responsive to their problem situations. In short, they are not relying only on scientific knowledge as a point of departure and inspiration but also on Indigenous knowledge, which they adopt it from their forefathers.