Higher Agricultural Education for poverty reduction: dynamics explored by IFAD grant programs

1
Higher Agricultural Education for poverty
reduction dynamics explored by IFAD grant
programs

• From new paradigms supporting farmer innovations
  to professional, pedagogic and institutional
  changes

2
Research in a new world

• Limitations of the linear models of innovation in
  the context of marginal locations, with very
  heterogeneous potential, risky production
  conditions and low input/output agriculture
• Failure of the transfer-of-technology model
• Emergence of innovation systems theory and
  acknowledgement of innovativeness as the result
  of a social process, rather than as an individual
  competence

3
General implications of the innovation system
theory

• System set of interrelated components working
  towards a common objective. Systems are made of
  i) components ii) relationships and iii)
  attributes/properties of the components.
• Questioning the components formal research is
  but one input into innovation processes
• Questioning the relationships need to strenghten
  the links among components
• Questioning the attributes new roles

4
Specific implications for IFAD

• New era for IFAD-financed research
  programmesgrants focussing not only on products
  but on research itself, on multi-actors learning
  and collaborative knowledge generation and
  management processes
• Recognizing the place and the role of informal
  science, based on farmers own research,
  experimentation, innovation dynamics

5
Specific implications for IFAD

• Strengthening linkages between agricultural
  knowledge information system (AKIS) in its 3
  inter-related components Extension/Research/Educa
  tion
• Investing in improvement of the connection
  between layers of the system GFAR, IARC/CGIAR
  (Global) Sub/Regional Fora NARS local farming
  communities

6
Specific implications for IFAD

• Support new learning conditions rather than
  technological research, stimulating innovation
  through closer interaction of different knowledge
  systems and redefinition of roles in the context
  of co-research settings
• Intervene simultaneously in four inter-related
  domains methodological, professional,
  pedagogical and institutional

7
Changing research methodologies

• The Farmer Field Fora or biodiversity fields
  (Champs de Diversité) platforms for collective
  and joint researchers/farmers experimentations,
  enhancing processes of co-research
• Two-way knowledge exchanges by facilitating
  social networking among actors

8
Changing professional qualifications

• Self-analyse conventional attitudes and
  behaviours the real activity of researchers
  and development agents
• Understand identity implications
• Distill emerging new competencies and redefine
  new job requirements

9
Change pedagogic approaches

• Involve N/S network of universities (last year
  students and tutor professors) in field
  activities (IFAD-loans) in support of farmers
  innovations to be identified, understood,
  characterized, improved pedagogic guide and
  applied action-research thesis produced
• Trigger through re-entry workshops reflection on
  new curricula content and teaching approaches
  needed to support local innovation transversal
  themes generated

10
Change institutional environment

• Create and sustain within formal research (and
  extension) organisations staff teams unveiling
  and questioning the often unspoken norms and
  rules that determine the (documented) patterns of
  behaviour of professionals and hinder change.
• Propose transformations from within encouraging
  professional change

11
Findings

• Holistic model of change not disputed
• Farmer-centered approach as an engine for
  changing partners modus operandi, including
  universities, proves valid
• Need to close the gap between participatory,
  hand-on discourse/rhetorics and reality
• Developing grant-loan synergies are sound
  instrument to this effect
• Investment in methodological improvements pays
  off

12
Challenges

• Control of holistic and systemic change out of
  reach for a specialized agency. Reliance on
  partnerships, but negotiation process, management
  of diversities and co-ordinated efforts towards a
  common goal prove to be overwhelmingly difficult
• Need to identify trigger points building
  farmers demand ? Supporting strategic agents of
  change ?

13
Challenges

• Measuring, documenting and disseminating
  achievements treated as an additional burden,
  not as part of the change process itsef,
  orienting it
• Change is a contagious process and should also
  affect the donor and the piloting agency(ies)

14
Challenges (HAE-specific)

• Logics, values and pace of academia distant from
  operational realities
• Field-orientation incentives can not only be of
  ethical nature, need to tackle material rewards
• North-South inter-university collaboration
  requires high level of co-ordination and related
  resources

15
Challenges (HAE-specific)

• University research specificity with regards to
  National Agricultural Research Institution
  mandate needs to be clarified should not
  compete
• Curricula change hindered by heavy bureaucratic
  and hierarchical constraints