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CIAT in Perspective 2003-2004
Cardinal Points Charting the Direction of Our Work

Learning to Innovate     Information intermediaries receiving training at Suárez, Cauca Department, in southwestern Colombia.

An initiative to spread the brushfires of rural discovery

In poor farming communities throughout the tropics, it is not business as usual. Mounting economic and environmental pressures on agrarian livelihoods are provoking a rethink of development strategies by all
concerned—producers, development workers, researchers, and donors. An adage for the times is “adapt or perish” or, more optimistically, “innovate and survive.”

Over the past year, CIAT’s Rural Innovation Institute has been devising a novel strategy for helping the rural poor identify problems, design solutions, institutionalize their newfound skills, and share experiences with others. Through our new “Learning to Innovate” (LTI) collaborative initiative, we are pulling together the various strands of our expertise in community outreach and empowerment in order to maximize their potential for impact. These include participatory approaches to plant breeding, land-use planning, monitoring and evaluation, rural agroenterprise design, and—the most recent strand—using new information and communications technologies (ICTs) for rural development. A new LTI model helps us understand what combinations of these elements will work best under different circumstances.

Going a step further, we and our partners have begun to set up what we call “learning alliances” as a way to apply this same innovation therapy to ourselves. A learning alliance is a coalition of R&D organizations, donors, and policy makers. Together, they implement a set of activities in an area of mutual interest, learn from that work, put lessons into practice, and reflect on what has worked and what has not. This learning process is helping not only CIAT but also our partners to become more efficient and innovative in how we ourselves foment rural innovation.

CIAT’s first learning alliance was formed in Nicaragua in 2001 with CARE International. Participants were representatives of 12 farmer organizations and seven local NGOs, in addition to CIAT and CARE staff. The learning focused on the promotion of agroenterprises using a territorial approach (as opposed to a product or sectoral approach) designed by CIAT researchers. A wider learning alliance of four Central American countries, including Nicaragua, was launched in late 2003 with CARE, and a similar alliance is taking shape in the Andean Region. In Africa a learning alliance focused on helping farmers build small businesses around new market opportunities is under way in nine countries, in collaboration with Catholic Relief Services (CRS).

Responding to global change

The need for a strong innovation capacity at grass roots level is made particularly urgent by three kinds of global change that are now exposing already vulnerable rural people in the tropics to further threats. The first is economic globalization, especially liberalized trade regimes. While this does open up new opportunities, it also means that traditional crops, such as maize in some South American countries, can in many cases no longer be grown competitively. Options are needed that will enable farmers to diversify their products and markets.

The second kind is climate change, to which crop production is highly sensitive. Here farmers need access to new and improved germplasm and new management practices, both to help them cope with shifts in temperature and rainfall patterns and to reduce the contribution of agriculture to global warming.

The third kind of global change is demographic. While the earth’s natural resources, including land, remain finite, population growth continues to push up the demand for food and other commodities. At the same time, rising incomes and urbanization are altering the patterns of that demand. Markets for animal products and convenience foods, for example, are expected to grow rapidly over the next few decades. New options are needed to help smallholder farmers intensify their enterprises and add value to their produce.

The pace of change is so rapid that traditional knowledge systems, which are mostly oral and usually based on personal contact within the local community, are generally unable to cope. Part of the answer is for rural people to gain better and more rapid access to technical information, through the Internet and other means. However, Boru Douthwaite, a technology policy analyst with CIAT’s Rural Innovation Institute, believes that won’t by itself be enough to persuade them to innovate. “Farmers and processors need support during the learning process, including exposure to the experience others have had in adopting an opportunity or invention.”

Modeling the innovation process

In the development context in which CIAT works, innovation can be defined as a process in which key rural stakeholders—individuals and communities who stand to benefit directly—transform inventions or new ideas into practical means of improving their livelihoods. In designing projects under the LTI initiative, Douthwaite and colleagues are attempting to replicate four key functions or ingredients that have been observed in the past to accompany successful rural innovation. These are: (1) opportunity information systems; (2) support to adoption-related decision making; (3) support to incipient innovation processes; and (4) an overview and feedback mechanism—something Douthwaite calls “meta-learning and selection.” This model of the innovation process helps outside agencies such as CIAT identify weaknesses in existing innovation systems and “orchestrate” a combination of participatory interventions that will be precisely tailored to the needs of a given community.

The model’s first three functions correspond to what training and technology transfer specialists often refer to as the “knowledge, attitudes, and practices” components of learning. The starting point is opportunity information systems. These can be any source of potentially practical ideas or inventions—databases, Web sites, radio programs, magazines, extension brochures, agricultural field days, or farmer exchange visits. Applications of the model have shown that this function often needs improving, especially in more remote rural areas.

Once the opportunities are known and understood, farmers must decide whether to adopt. That is, whether to “embark on the experiential learning process involved in innovation,” as Douthwaite puts it. “People need convincing that an invention or new idea is a potential winner for them. For example, someone considering growing lulo (a small tomato-like fruit native to Colombia and Ecuador) for the first time may need to know whether it will survive at a particular altitude.” Support mechanisms for dealing with such issues include farmer field trials, market surveys, discussion groups, and participatory collection and evaluation of site-specific information.

The next step, assuming a decision to adopt has been made, comprises experimentation or adaptation of the new idea—normally a steep learning curve for the innovator. Here things can quickly and easily go wrong. Without timely solutions to the practical difficulties encountered when learning something new, people can become discouraged and decide to give up. Personal contact with other innovators and experts, as well as other less direct technical backstopping, such as on-line question-and-answer services, are essential at this point in the process.

Meta-learning and selection, the fourth function that feeds into the other three, is a way of capturing lessons from past innovation experiences and making them available to current efforts. “A CIAT colleague of mine in Asia recently commented that really good innovations spread like brushfires,” says Douthwaite. “The learning and selection function in our model of innovation is a way of spotting those fires and telling people elsewhere about them. At the same time, it can warn people to avoid technologies or ideas known to be innovation blind alleys.”

Information and communication technologies

Apart from relatively simple options, such as high-yielding crop varieties suitable for uniform growing conditions, rural innovations, whether biophysical or social, can seldom be applied directly off the shelf. Rather, they must be adapted through numerous learning cycles carried out by individuals and groups. The aim of CIAT’s LTI initiative is to speed up the learning process by linking innovators with one another and with past experience. This implies a strong commitment to helping communities find, store, generate, and share information and knowledge, in large part by exploiting new ICTs. While the learning tools now available are powerful and promising, there are caveats.

On the one hand, there exists a huge body of Internet-based rural technical knowledge to support adoption decisions and incipient innovation. And it is growing rapidly, in part thanks to the work of many research institutes, including CIAT, and of specialized NGOs. In addition, most large towns and cities in the developing world now have commercial cybercafes and in some instances publicly funded Internet access points, such as community telecenters. (Telecenters differ from cybercafes in that they are usually operated by local not-for-profit organizations, which typically provide users with personalized training in computer applications, including on-line searches.)

On the other hand, direct personal access to the Internet is still many years away for the vast majority of rural households. In fact, basic telephone voice service is still a luxury in most rural areas of the tropics. And even where people do have limited Internet access through schools and other institutions, a knowledge culture based on ICTs has yet to emerge.
“Better public access to ICTs by no means guarantees rural people will use them to get information that will help introduce technical innovations or improve their livelihoods,” says Nathan Russell, manager of CIAT’s Information and Communications for Rural Communities (InforCom) Project. “For that to happen, local organizations have to make a deliberate effort to build ICTs into pro-poor development efforts.”

For the past 3 years, InforCom has been experimenting with ways of promoting and supporting community telecenters as rural development tools. This work has been done in collaboration with universities and other organizations in southwestern Colombia.

As proof-of-concept, the telecenter pilot work is encouraging. To date, the benefits have been largely institutional in that the community organizations hosting the telecenters have been strengthened by the experience. In one instance, a telecenter in the militarily insecure town of Santander de Quilichao, operated by an indigenous organization representing 75,000 mostly Páez people, succeeded in mobilizing support to denounce a string of human rights violations. These abuses, which were exposed internationally on the Internet, included assassinations of indigenous leaders. The telecenter’s contribution was a good example of how ICTs can support social, as well as technical, innovation—in this case serving to defend basic human rights flouted by both left-wing guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries.

The “orchestration of CIAT competencies” envisaged by the LTI initiative will expand the value of ICTs as a service to all four innovation-support functions. Telecenters in particular have a critical role to play in building agroenterprises—an increasingly important entry point for scaling up the use of CIAT research results.

Local communicators straddle the digital divide

In 2003, InforCom staff began investigating the potential role of information intermediaries. The idea here was to bridge the digital divide between ICT services (including those in telecenters) and farmers, using young local communicators to promote a culture of knowledge acquisition. “Our impact data showed that many farmers don’t have easy access to the telecenter or don’t feel inclined to use it,” explains Russell. “Or, if they do visit, they won’t necessarily have a concrete idea of their information needs.”

Nearly 15 years of CIAT experience with local agricultural research committees (the Spanish acronym is CIALs) have demonstrated how successful farmers can be at conducting practical adaptive research and developing successful agroenterprises on behalf of their local communities. CIAT expects that small communications teams, each consisting of 6 to 10 rural youths with a strong interest in ICTs, can likewise serve as catalysts to rural innovation. Such teams, duly trained in a variety of communications media, are currently being set up within community organizations in Colombia’s Cauca Department.

“If successful,” says Russell, “these teams could provide a useful support service to local research and agroenterprise development.” Producers of crude sugar (panela), silk, and coffee are among the innovators expected to benefit in the pilot area.

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