Promotion of Farmer Innovation and Experimentation in Ethiopia (PROFIEET)

Background to and report on the National Workshop, 25–27 August 2003

by Amanuel Assefa, Agri-Service Ethiopia

Introduction

Many institutions involved in rural development, both locally and globally, are giving greater attention to the indigenous knowledge (IK) of farmers. Researchers and practitioners in rural development are now seeing farmers’ knowledge not as a static asset but rather as a dynamic system of local experimentation and innovation that could form the basis for sustainable development.

Organisations in Ethiopia that share the same view of the strengths and potentials of farmer-led research and development have taken the initiative to set up a multi- stakeholder platform for Promoting Farmer Innovation and Experimentation in Ethiopia (PROFIEET).

The concept in brief

The challenges that we now face in rural development have spurred on many professionals to seek more effective approaches and strategies that could help them gain a deeper understanding of and give greater support to the dynamism found in the rural areas. In Ethiopia, agricultural research and extension are central to the agendas of many governmental organisations (GOs) and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) aimed at increasing good security and achieving sustainable rural livelihoods. How can agricultural research be made more relevant to smallholder farmers living in diverse and complex realities? How can extension approaches and services fit into this new paradigm of agricultural research and development? These are major topics of discussion in many fora within Ethiopia. They have also become global concerns, and movements similar to PROFIEET are taking place in many other countries.

PROFIEET is an initiative aimed at promoting farmer innovation by creating an enabling institutional and policy environment for farmer-led research and extension approaches. The core agenda of the initiative is to create space in which formal researchers and extension workers can support the informal experiments of innovative farmers and rural communities. The whole idea is to help farmers come up with cost-effective and ecologically friendly innovations that fit their own local realities. This is a process of empowering farmers and rural communities. A major principle of the approach is to give farmers more opportunity and self-confidence to make their own decisions about research and development.

In this approach, people from outside the farming communities respect the proposals, ideas, theories and decisions of farmers not only for the sake of moral reasoning but because the knowledge base of innovator farmers is very powerful and realistic. The outsiders have an extremely important role to play in providing relevant information, methodological support and other forms of assistance for local experimentation, without jeopardising the local innovation processes. This approach does not deny the necessity of basic research. There is no intention to replace the current research and extension approaches in the country. It introduces a new dimension of thinking that complements existing approaches and links them with farmers’ realities. PROFIEET could be easily accommodated within the framework of current agricultural research and extension without bringing conflicts of interest into the system. Making a logical link and striking a balance between the knowledge worlds of innovative farmers and formally educated experts is central to this initiative.

Background to the building up of the PROFIEET platform

A few organisations in Ethiopia are already in the midst of Farmer Participatory Research (FPR), Participatory Technology Development (PTD) and similar forms of development-oriented research that regard farmers as the main actors in the innovation process. There is very high interest among various other development practitioners – particularly those concerned with food security – to become more familiar with and skilled in participatory research and extension approaches. Many formal researchers and field practitioners are also very keen to see live, on-the- ground cases of innovations that have been developed under the leadership or active participation of farmers.

In January 2002, Agri Service Ethiopia (ASE) – a national NGO implementing food- security programmes in three provinces – and Mekelle University – the lead agency for the second phase of the Netherlands-funded Indigenous Soil and Water Conservation Project (ISWC-2) – organised a national familiarisation workshop on the concepts of PROFIEET for regional policymakers in all Bureaux of Agriculture in Ethiopia. ASE, Mekelle University and FARM-Africa – an NGO that has been promoting FPR in the Southern Region of Ethiopia for several years – presented their experiences with farmer innovators and FPR / PTD. The workshop participants showed great interest in this work and asked the workshop organisers to continue organising educational fora on PROFIEET. Some even requested the establishment of a national network that could provide backstopping to them while they implement and – in the process – learn more about the concepts of farmer innovation and experimentation.

The organising committee of the January 2002 workshop took the comments and requests of the participants on board and began to consider opportunities and possibilities to bring together the Ethiopian experiences in farmer innovation and experimentation and to allow all relevant actors to learn from each other. It was at this point in time that our international partners – ETC Ecoculture based in the Netherlands – expressed willingness to solicit funds for an national workshop that would aim at scaling up the approach of participatory research and development, building on farmer innovation and experimentation.

ASE entered into formal contacts with ETC Ecoculture and made an institutional commitment to work as secretariat and facilitator of multi-stakeholder interaction in designing a PROFIEET platform and programme, and to administer the funds made available by IFAD (International Fund for Agricultural Development) through ETC Ecoculture for this initial design phase. A Steering Committee was established to oversee the process of preparing and carrying out the PROFIEET National Workshop. It was composed of both GOs and NGOs: the Ministry of Agriculture (MoA), the Commission for Science and Technology (CST), the Ethiopian Agricultural Research Organisation (EARO), Mekelle University, Debub University, FARM-Africa, SOS-Sahel and ASE. The major activities of the Steering Committee were to organise an inventory and analysis of relevant experiences in Ethiopia and to bring these together in a national workshop which would presumably lead to a collective commitment by all relevant stakeholders and a plan of action to scale up the approach.

ETC Ecoculture has been catalysing and supporting similar processes in other countries in an initiative to build up a global programme called PROLINNOVA (PROmoting Local INNOVAtion in ecologically-oriented agriculture and natural resource management). A global platform for PROLINNOVA is growing as movements similar to PROFIEET emerge in several countries and show an interest to come together for synergy and mutual support, as well as for policy influence at international level. The PROFIEET initiative can thus contribute to the formation and strengthening of the global network and would share experiences and receive support from the constituents of PROLINNOVA.

The National Workshop on PROFIEET

The national workshop to design a PROFIEET plan of action was conducted on 25– 27 August 2003 in the Debre Zeit Management Institute southeast of Addis Ababa. Representatives from research organisations, experimenting farmers, NGOs, Ministry and Bureaux of Agriculture, universities and the Commission for Science and Technology took part. His Excellency Ato Mulugeta Ameha, Commissioner for Science and Technology, made the official opening. Dr Ann Waters-Bayer from ETC Ecoculture made the keynote address. She also provided backstopping to the PROFIEET Steering Committee over a period of eight months leading up to the workshop. The Steering Committee hired a consultant, Dr Yohannes Gebre Michael, to prepare the workshop and hired Dr Tesfaye Beshah, Department of Agricultural Extension of Alemaya University, to facilitate it during the entire three days.

A total of 51 participants, including 7 farmers, attended the workshop. Eight papers on experiences of GOs and NGOs in farmer participatory research and development were presented. The presentations provided ample opportunity to share practical experiences and learning points, and to raise the level of awareness of all participants.

Some farmers also presented case studies on local innovation and experimentation. They described, for example, how – in the framework of Farmer Field Schools – they are trying to arrest the infestation by flea beetles in Gojam. Farmers from Amaro explained how they are trying to deal with bacterial wilt, a very aggressive plant disease for which formal research has not yet come up with any effective treatment. These and other presentations stimulated in-depth discussions on the concepts of local innovation and FPR / PTD. Many workshop participants expressed their warm appreciation to the farmer innovators who presented the cases. Video films were shown in the two evening sessions in order to give the participants a chance to gain still more information on farmer innovation and participatory research. A farmers panel discussion on the second day of the workshop gave yet another opportunity for the other participants to understand farmers’ perspectives on the linkages between farming communities and outsiders from both GOs and NGOs and the type of support appreciated by farmers.

The workshop participants then identified gaps and challenges in participatory approaches to research and development based on farmer innovation and experimentation. The groups were formed on the basis of institutional affiliation (policymakers, research, extension, NGOs, farmers). This helped them to make critical self-evaluation of their own formal or informal institutions in connection with participatory research and extension. The gaps and challenges as presented by the groups were discussed in the plenary. A small team was then formed to summarise the group findings during the evening, for presentation the following morning on the final day of the workshop. The summary report listed the most important gaps / challenges as being:

 Lack of awareness on FPR at all levels  Challenge to institutionalise the approach  Absence of proper linkages between the relevant stakeholders  Limited information flow on issues of farmer research  Frequently changing policy directions of the government.

New groups were then formed on the basis of interest in these topics, so that each group could work on how to deal with the different gaps / challenges. For ease of analysis and to have better balance in group size, the gaps / challenges were combined into three major ones:

 Awareness issues  Institutionalisation  Linkages

During the subsequent plenary session, each group presented objectives, strategies and major activities to address these three major gaps / challenges.

Finally, the possible institutional arrangement to implement the activities was discussed. The two main options were:

1. to endorse the existing Steering Committee as a multi-stakeholder PROFIEET platform, with the addition of some other important stakeholders; or 2. to hand over the activities of the Steering Committee to the recently formed National Research and Extension Council.

After much lively discussion about the pros and cons, agreement was finally reached that the Steering Committee should continue working for some years, with the addition of three more members: Alemaya University, the Institute for Sustainable Development (ISD) and the Pastoral Forum Ethiopia (PFE). It has not yet been decided how the voices of the highland smallholder farmers, in addition to those of pastoralists, can be brought into this platform. The PROFIEET Steering Committee will have a strategic plan of handing over the activities to the National Research and Extension Council – and, in the case of regional platforms, to the regional Research and Extension Advisory Councils – assuming that PROFIEET will be able to contribute to strengthening these Councils and helping to make them fully operational in all parts of the country. The Steering Committee will continue to be chaired by EARO, with ASE serving as secretariat.

Next steps

In the coming weeks, the proceedings of the national workshop will be finalised, the plan of action outlined in the workshop will be drawn up in more detail as a proposal that includes own institutional contributions, and letters of agreement will be drawn up and signed to specify the roles of the various stakeholder organisations in PROFIEET as well as to formalise institutional backing.

The new expanded Steering Committee will also be hosting the international PROLINNOVA workshop, which will be held in Ethiopia in a few months’ time. In view of the extremely high interest of the relevant Ethiopian organisations to learn from the other countries, the Steering Committee members would like to take part in at least the sessions of the international workshop for experience sharing and field visits, fully realising that a more limited representation from Ethiopia will be needed during the sessions for planning international PROLINNOVA activities.