Sharing Agricultural Practices to Enhance Food and Nutrition Security in the Horn of Africa

All roads lead to Ethiopia, as Eastern Africa converges at the International Livestock Research Centre (ILRI) campus in Addis Ababa from 23-25 October to share knowledge, practices, technology and innovations that have consistently shown results superior to those achieved through other means, in enhancing food and nutrition security in the Horn of Africa.

This will be done through an AgriKnowledge ShareFair organized by FAO Subregional Office for Eastern Africa and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD). The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the World Food Programme (WFP), the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) and the Eastern African Grain Council (EAGC) are also collaborating in this forum that brings the multiple expertise and networks of international organizations from the region namely: Burundi, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan and Uganda. Senior officials from Comité permanent Inter-Etats de Lutte contra la Sécheresse dans le Sahel (CiLIS) and the affected countries in the Sahel will also be participating at the fair.

Dr. Castro Camarada, FAO Coordinator for Eastern Africa explains why sharing information on good agricultural practices is vital to enhancing food and nutrition security in the region.

Growing local farmers: De-rooting poverty (194)

The Topic: An agricultural enterprise uses some of its excess capacity to provide support to smallholders in Ethiopia  
The Owner: Amare Abebaw Woreta (Frag Agro Industry)  
The facilitator/blogger: Riff Fullan (HELVETAS Swiss Intercooperation)

The session: Amare told the story of how he - after graduating from school - established a small agricultural enterprise which became profitable after some time. But Amare noticed that the vast majority of farmers in the Amhara region where he was located were not improving their lives, they were only just getting by. They only had around 1/2 hectare of land per family and mostly relied on rain-fed agriculture. Amare's company decided to invite farmers to see what the company was doing and - for those who were interested - take up interest-free loans (based on a group of farmers, so the group would collectively have responsibility for repayment) to buy inputs and take up some of the company's practice of focusing on more profitable crops. The company also helped 'graduates' of its demonstration activities to form cooperatives and worked to ensure the coops had access to market information and could take advantage of the best prices. Half of the target group were female-headed households, half male-headed.

Following Amare's story, we decided to have a short Q&A followed by a loosely structured peer assist. The idea was to have a conversation triggered initially by immediate questions and observations from participants in the group, then to move on to a couple of key questions from Amare's side for which he was seeking input.

What did participants have to say? One of the first questions was why Amare did not charge interest on the loans. How could it be sustainable? Amare responded that it was a trust issue: farmers were used to seeing microfinance institutions providing loans - often at high interest rates - that also required collateral (e.g. a goat, a cow), which represented a huge risk for the farmers. Amare wanted to invite interested farmers to take part in the innovative behaviour based on their experiences of seeing how things were done on the company farm, and without having the risk overhead.

Still, there was a feeling that the company could charge a small amount of interest in order to support the continuing program of farmer training, especially after its initial success with several groups of farmers over several years (totalling around 70 farmers so far). What else? Maybe forming a marketing company that could help farmers and coops link up more effectively to markets. Other ideas around sustainability included:

• the notion that support for the whole value chain needed to be considered (finance, marketing, information, logistics, etc), and that part of the sustainability equation was capacity building of these new coops (where most members might be illiterate and/or have little education or experience along the value chain);
• another is that farmers needed to have a sense of ownership for such coops to thrive. In this context, the voluntary and low-risk nature of the venture really helps;
• a third is the possibility to mobilize educated youth who could help with some aspects of running/organising activities and thereby generate a bit of income for themselves while filling some of the skills gaps the farmers have;
• in terms of changing production processes, the idea was raised that processing of agricultural outputs (e.g. mangoes into mango juice) and selling a higher value-added product could help on the sustainability front.

The final two threads that were briefly covered in our group peer assist/conversation, included the potential for additional activities to be boosted, given that the normal agricultural season runs from roughly April-Oct, so there is usually some time when farmers are not so busy, especially if they depend on the rains. Second was the whole challenge of climate change......most farmers have heard little or nothing about it, and anyway look at the vagaries of the weather as God's will rather than being tied to climate change. How can dialogues be undertaken that respect different world views yet still promote active adaptation? One idea was raised that had been mentioned in another sharefair session, the 'theatre of the oppressed' a methodology made famous by Brazilian Augusto Boal in the 60s and influenced by the 'pedagogy of the oppressed' methodology of his countryman, the educator Paulo Freire.

In a nutshell, both approaches work to engage community members in describing/perceiving and transforming the contexts in which they live. They aspire to a high level of ownership and definition of the problematique and approaches to overcoming key challenges by those whose lives are most directly affected. This could be a way for the farmers in this Ethiopian case to incorporate climate change issues and solutions into their own worldviews and ways of living.

All-in-all, a very interesting and wide-ranging conversation. I know Amare will go home with lots of ideas to try out!

Highlights from Marc Davies' keynote on 'Demystifying Private-Public Partnerships'

A well told story: Effective communication for development

A inspiring talk opened the first day of the Share Fair unfolding in Rome from today to Thursday 29 September. Rob Burnet leads Well Told Story, a multi-award-winning Kenyan communications company which pulls together comic books, syndicated FM radio, SMS, social media, web, video animation, strategy and science to help change the way people live, think, act and govern in East Africa.

In his talk, he shared with the audience his experiences and focussed specifically on how to make agriculture more attractive to young people in Africa. In this interview, he summaries the main points of his key note address.

According to Rob, when you want to reach young people with ideas about agriculture, it is about taking the research that we know it works and getting it into the life of people that need to benefit from it.

Secondly, it has to be about 'pull', and it can't be about 'push': "it is about packaging ideas that the youth will take and run away with" says Rob.

Moreover, according to Rob it we fell short of making good research outputs and ideas accessible form the ones that have to benefit from them, "we might as well go home".

In this sense, Rob concludes with a provocative statement as he encourages the CGIAR to spend 30% its budget on research communication, making sure that the research outputs produced during the past 10 years reach the people they are intended to benefit. "We do this, and we really can change the world."

All good things come to an end: Chronicle of last day at Agknowledge Africa Share Fair #sfaddis

Originally posted on IFAD social reporting blog

I am now sitting at the penultimate session of the Agknowledge Africa Knowledge Share Fair - Focus on Farmers. I am sorry the event is coming to an end. The purpose of this share fair was to share and learn and I believe that we've achieved this goal. I hope that the fair has left a footprint in the hearts, minds and souls of the participants.

Earlier in the day I attended the radio and telecentre focus groups. The radio session was a great example of the impact of the Share Fair. The room was packed with participants who before the share fair did not know anything about podcasting, podcasting/audio software and hardware. Three days later here they were showing us the audio files they have created, sharing tips on how to conduct an effective interview and discuss challenges of interviewing with the help of an interpreter and avoiding being lost in translation.

We closed the radio session with one of the participants saying: "YES WE CAN. I now know HOW TO." That was such a wonderful way of finishing the session and showed the footprint of the share fair.

Often we are asked "what has been the impact of events such as share fair". The impact of these events are transformative. They change the way people work. They open your mind and remove the cobwebs in your mind and as a result you inevitably change behaviour which is transformative.

The telecentre session discussed issues of sustainabililty and how to generate local content. I think we came out of the session agreeing that we should rebapitze telecentres to "Knowledge hubs" or "Service centres".

On issue of sustainability, Paul offered some pragmatic advice on how to create a sustainable service centre, namely make sure:

• your services are competitive


• have a number of subsidized services so that you can keep your competitive edge


• provide a number of free services - especially services that really add value and improve the livelihoods of the smallholder producers, smallholder farmers and rural people

During the session participants mentioned that farmers are willing to pay for information and knowledge which is relevant to them. Personally, I have a problem with that, as we should consider knowledge is public global good and should be made available free of charge. But I stand to be corrected.

The group talked about how in Africa the village experts do not recognize themselves as experts and this is one of the reasons why local knowledge is not documented and shared. We talked about how Africans should exploit and make sure to systematically use their oral culture, their tradition of drama and songs to share local content.

One of the best reflections of this session was the fact that often indigenous knowledge is not valued and challenged by experts/researchers. This made me reflect that it seems to be human nature to underestimate one's own knowledge, perhaps this is why sharing tacit knowledge is a challenge?

We just finished the small group reflection and learning session and have successfully summarized the footprint and impact of this remarkable event in a tweet. Stay tuned and we'll be tweeting them live shortly. Follow #sfaddis

Day two of Agknowledge Africa Knowledge Share Fair features focus groups

Posted by Roxanna Samii, originally posted on IFAD social reporting blog

Day two of the Agknowledge Africa Share Fair featured a series of focus groups. Participants had a wide choice and seamlessly distributed themselves among nine different focus groups.

I attended a fascinating session entitled "reporting agriculture" followed by a frustrating session on "mobile devices".

Susanna Thorp from WRENmedia gave a great presentation highlighting the challenges and opportunities of reporting on agricultural related issues. "Agriculture is a multidimensional and multifaceted subject", said Susanna. I was so pleased to hear Susanna refer to smallholder farmers as entrepeneurs. This statement resonates exactly with IFAD's vision!

She then proceeded to touch upon another topic close to IFAD's heart - young people. "We need to reach out to the young people, agriculture is not SUBSISTENCE only. Agriculture is a source of business!", said Susanna.

Not pre-empting the youth session later during the day, we talked how we can keep young people in the farming business. There was a consensus that for this to happen farming has to become a source of income.

The participants recognized that farmers do farming in an integrated manner and they do not just tackle one single aspect. This may be a challenge when one has to report about the topic. At the same time everyone recognized that farmers need to trust their information/knowledge source.

Moving to challenges and opportunities of reporting on agriculture, participants mentioned that one of the challenges we collectively face is to make journalists understand the value of reporting about agriculture. How can we make agriculture an enticing and attractive subject matter?

Rob Burnet shared a wonderful story of convergence of various technologies to communicate effectively. So we start with gold old radio. There was unanimous recognition that radio is an important communication tool for farmers to share information and knowledge.

Rob talked about an FM station run out of Kenya by young people called Shujaaz. What these young people are doing is absolutely remarkable. Besides running the FM station, they are disseminating agriculture related stories via a comic book, which they are distributing through the National Kenyan newspaper and through 12,000 M-PESA kiosks!!!

Moving on from radio, more convergence with social media tools. Shujaaz.fm also has a Facebook account with over 5000 followers, uses Twitter and of course the ubiquitous SMS messaging.

Susanna concluded the session by saying: "If you want to sell anything - especially if you wish to share and report on agriculture you need to be passionate!" And believe me there were many many passionate participants under the tent!!

Later during the day, I attended the mobile session and also virtually participated in the youth session thanks to Gauri's tweet coming out of that session.

I was very frustrated by the mobile session, as I heard more and more about pilot programmes which did not quite make it to the real world. This is really sad. I fail to understand why we need to duplicate and reinvent the wheel when it comes to developing mobile applications. How many market information applications do we need? How many pest control applications do we need.

I came out of that session thinking that there is little or no hope for private-public partnership. I think the only viable way of making any head way is for governments to play a much more prominent role and take things into hand!

In my virtual conversation with Gauri it was nice to see IPSAfrica (@ipsafrica) chipping. I hope they take the suggestion of hosting a virtual converation with young African people to see what is needed for them to stay in rural areas and become the future entrepreneurs!

We finished the morning with a lovely typical Ethiopian lunch. As today was Wednesday, we had a special "fasting lunch", which was based on beans, fish and vegetables!

I've now become an addict to the Bunna, so I proceeded to the Bunna corner and thoroughly enjoyed the wonderful Ethiopian coffee.

Tonight promises to be an exciting night. We'll be having a barbecue and we've been promised good music by the best DJ in town!!!