| Innovation Africa Symposium
20th-23rd November 2006, Kampala, Uganda
 An
international Symposium on agricultural innovation systems
in Africa was held on 20-23 November 2006 in Entebbe,
Uganda. It was jointly organised by CIAT, IFPRI-ISNAR
(International Service for National Agricultural Research
programme of the International Food Policy Research Institute),
ILRI
(International Livestock Research Institute), IIRR-Africa
(International Institute for Rural Reconstruction) and PROLINNOVA
(Promoting Local Innovation). The Innovation Africa Symposium
brought together 140 researchers and practitioners involved
in innovation systems to share current thinking, experiences,
advances and lessons. It included plenary keynotes, small
group discussions, mini-workshops and an interactive information
market for researchers and practitioners, who included innovative
farmers. Together, the participants drew up lessons for
policy, research, development and practice of innovation in
agriculture and natural resource management (NRM) in Africa.
 New! Innovation Africa Book - Earthscan Publications
More information
Points of View: Agricultural Innovation. New Agriculturist.
ERI
Introduction
 Globalisation
means that today's farmers are facing new threats and opportunities.
These emerging trends may lead to the marginalisation of some
regions, countries or groups within countries, especially
rural women and the poor. Therefore, rural communities must
be able to innovate faster to adapt to and exploit these global
trends. Within the Enabling Rural Innovation (ERI) initiative,
we aim to empower farmers' and communities' to experiment
and develop market opportunities through the application of
innovative participatory approaches, to capitalise on these
emerging market opportunities. This approach, in which rural
communities' become active partners in processes of co-innovation,
predisposes fundamental changes in the behaviour, roles and
functions of formal agricultural R&D service providers.
As farmers successfully experiment and learn, the community
begins to create a sustained and collective capacity for innovation
to improve their livelihoods.
In eastern and southern Africa, CIAT is applying elements
of the ERI approach in the action-research mode in partnership
with national agricultural research and extension services
(NARES), nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), and rural communities
to empower communities.
The Enabling Rural Innovation (ERI)
Approach
ERI is a mutual collective learning process for empowering
rural communities and facilitating an enabling environment
to access and generate technical and market information for
improving farmers' decision-making. The ERI approach is based
on the following important principles:
- Developing local capacities to innovate, experiment, access
market opportunities and manage their resources in a more
sustainable manner.
- Integrating Farmer Participatory Research and Participatory
Market Research approaches to build the agricultural assets
of rural women and the poor.
- Integrating equity and gender considerations to improve
the distribution of benefits.
- Applying the Resources-to-Consumption System: Forward
and Backward linkages between production, marketing and
investment in NRM.
Desired Outcomes
- Rural communities identify and develop sustainable enterprises
that generate income and employment.
- Communities generate and access information, knowledge
and technology in support of their productive activities
and to demand effective services in support of these activities.
- Local support institutions and community organisations
provide an enabling environment that permits development
to proceed.
The Essential Role of Participation
The involvement of farmers as decision-makers in all stages
of the innovation process is an essential characteristic of
the ERI approach. The ERI approach begins by analysing the
targeted community's strengths and opportunities (rather than
of its problems and constraints, as is usual). To take advantage
of those strengths and opportunities, the participation of
the community's stakeholders is essential, whether they be
farmers, other community members, outside business entities,
or governmental and non-governmental organisations. Participation
helps to facilitate the collective analysis and understanding
of community assets, ascertain community capabilities and
opportunities, and thus create a collective vision of desired
future conditions. With this vision, strategies for achieving
improved livelihoods can be defined and rural people empowered
to become able agents of their own change.
Conceptual Framework for ERI: Resource-to-Consumption
System
The "resource-to-consumption" (R-to-C) system provides
a practical framework for linking the related paradigms within
ERI in a way that offers prospects for an upward spiral out
of poverty. The R-to-C framework extends the commodity chain
to include investment in natural resource management, and
to specifically link the integrated nutrient management to
market opportunities. The R-to-C system focuses on increasing
household food security and producing crops that have identified
market opportunities.
This approach differs from the conventional one, which tries
to find markets for surplus production at harvest when commodity
prices are at their lowest. More specifically, the new framework
links farmer participatory research, market opportunity identification,
and development of technologies for integrated soil and nutrient
management. It also brings in a focus on women and poor by
integrating gender and social differences into the innovation
processes. The active involvement of stakeholders in the design
of an INM system points to ways of tightening the nutrient
cycle in relation to, for example, women's management of small
livestock, or the multipurpose use of legumes as sources of
biomass for soil fertility, forage, fuel, and fencing.
Components of the ERI Approach
The ERI approach has several key components:
Building
and Managing Effective Partnerships
 A
first step in the ERI approach is to select, build, and sustain
effective partnerships. Partners play significant roles in
facilitating each stage of a targeted community's progress
towards sustainable, improved productivity and economic well-being.
Successful innovations result from strong interactions and
knowledge flows within networks of stakeholders with strong
feedback loops among various actors and partners.
For example, in Malawi, Uganda, and Tanzania, CIAT collaborates
in more than twenty pilot/learning sites with at least 12
partners, who comprise national agricultural research institutes,
governmental extension services, NGOs, local administrations,
the private sector, and community-based organizations. Each
of these pilot sites is used for mutual learning and information
sharing between CIAT and its partner. Partners are selected,
not only for their interest in incorporating the ERI approach
into their on-going research or development work, but also
on the basis of institutional assessment, their working relationships
with local communities, and potential to scale up the impacts.
Participatory
Diagnosis
 Once
the partners are chosen, the next step is to conduct a participatory
diagnosis (PD) of the targeted community. This process requires
the participation of various stakeholders, the partners, farmers,
and other members of the targeted community. The objective
is to establish highly interactive dialogue with farmers and
the community so that a collective analysis may be carried out
of the community's livelihood assets, opportunities, and strategies.
This should facilitate the community's capacity to create
a collective vision of its desired future conditions. With
the vision established, the next stages is the development
of a community action plan for change to achieve better livelihood
outcomes.
Identifying
Market Opportunities and Selecting Community Agroenterprises
 The
ERI approach aims to enhance the ability of smallholder, resource-poor
farmers to access market opportunities and actively engage
with them. The goal is to create an entrepreneurial culture
in rural communities, whereby farmers produce what they can
market rather than trying to market what they produce.
This component of ERI is conducted through a participatory
market research (PMR) process. The PMR process is based on
a territorial approach as opposed to a commodity approach
for identifying market opportunities and building profitable
agro-enterprises for small-scale farmers. Producing for the
market is inherently more risky than producing crops and raising
livestock for one's own consumption.
The PMR process builds capacity of a group of farmers (market
research group), who represent their communities, to collect
information on existing crops and products, or new ones that
they have identified through PD as having market potential.
The market research group synthesises the market information
and provides feedback to the community. To select options
for generating income requires collecting information that
will help the farmer make appropriate decisions based on his
or her situation. Here, the "market facilitator"—a
technician from a governmental or non-governmental organisation—plays
a vital role. The market facilitator guides a group of farmers
in identifying market opportunities and their evaluation to
reduce the risk of making inappropriate decisions that may
prove costly in the medium term.
Farmer
Experimentation and Participatory Technology Development
 As
local communities start to develop agroenterprises and diversify
their market-oriented production, they need to gain new knowledge
and skills. For example, they need to understand integrated
soil fertility and pest management so they can sustain more
intensive, market-oriented production, and overcome constraints
to developing profitable enterprises. Farmer participatory
research increases community's ability to experiment with
selected enterprise options and provides them with more skills
for solving production problems. This phase is also seen as
necessary for reducing risks for the new enterprises, and
for maintaining the balance between food security and market
orientation.
Farmer experimentation is an iterative process, whereby the
farmer research group learns to analysze the constraints to
increasing the productivity of selected crop and livestock
options, prioritise options, and design and plan experiments
to overcome these constraints. The farmer research group will
carry out the experiments on behalf of the community, and
will hold regular feedback meetings to share research results
with community members.
In this process, soil improvement through INM is seen as
an important part of asset building for the poor, and especially
for poor women farmers who rely on the intensification of
subsistence and cash cropping. Experimentation focuses on
innovations that are compatible with women's constraints and
opportunities in managing both the natural resource base and
the agricultural production system.
Strengthening
Social Capital and Promoting Gender Equity
 Developing
a critical mass of scientists and development partners is
crucial for both enabling rural innovation and scaling up
an ERI process. ERI cacity-building strategy involves training
workshops with regular follow-ups, updates and reviews, mentoring,
action learning, sharing, and development of field manuals.
At the community level, strengthening the social capital of
rural communities and their organizational capacity is critical
for horizontal and vertical linkages among communities, and
between pilot communities and rural service providers.
Gender equity and empowerment of women are of central to
the ERI process, and are integrated in all stages from: Selection
of communities and partners, participatory diagnosis and community
planning, identifying and selecting market opportunities,
farmer experimentation and capacity building, and developing
strategies for scaling up to other communities. The ERI process
specifically uses gender-sensitive participatory tools to
bring gender issues to the forefront and to create awareness
of gender issues in a more systematic manner. Proactive strategies
and gender-sensitive facilitation skills are used to build
the capacity of both men and women farmers in identifying
and evaluating a diverse range of market opportunities, and
in experimenting with a range of crop and soil fertility management
technologies. Gender equity and empowerment of women is integrated
in all the stages of the ERI process from
Facilitating
Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation Processes
 The
ERI approach facilitates the development of participatory
monitoring and evaluation (PM&E) systems so that stakeholders,
including local people, can decide how progress should be
measured and define criteria for success. In these processes,
local people are involved in developing indicators to measure
change, in collecting and analyzing data, and in making decisions
on how to adjust activities.
The objective of PM&E is to strengthen social and human
capital assets of the rural poor, thus enabling them to innovate
and analyse their strategies, and to make adjustments accordingly.
Results of PM&E feed directly into improving their livelihoods
by indicating more relevant and timely improvements in agricultural
innovation. PM&E results also have a wider impact through
farmers having an improved capacity to make effective demands
on service providers.
Building PM&E systems at both community and project levels
ensures that lessons are documented and adjustments to the
project are made in a timely manner. This is critical for
providing feedback on lessons learned and for scaling up the
process into agricultural research and development organisations.
Strategies
for Scaling Up
 A
scaling-up strategy helps increase impact, ensures that R&D
partners and communities apply the ERI framework for better
decision-making, and encourages policy-makers to be aware
and supportive.
One challenge of participatory research is to determine how
to use what has been learned in local environments to generate
lessons of wider applicability and thus scale up. Achieving
success with the ERI approach requires that a scaling-up strategy
be explicitly mapped out from the initial selection of partners
and communities so lessons may be shared with other partners
and organisations.
An important criterion for selecting partners and communities
is the potential they offer in the implementation of strategies
for scaling up, that is, strategies of quickly reaching more
people and communities with quality benefits over a wider
geographic area. The potential must be pitched against the
levels and key objectives specified for scaling up, as well
as against the roles and responsibilities of the different
actors. Key objectives include:
- Institutionalising the ERI approach within existing partner
organisations, and building the capacity of new partners
to apply the ERI framework in their on-going work with communities;
- Reaching more farmers and communities for better decision-making
and adoption of technology within pilot communities and
to other communities; and
- Influencing policy-makers within governments, NARES,
and NGOs to support ERI initiatives to improve rural livelihoods.
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