Storming the ivory towers: Time for scientists to get out, ‘get social’, to learn better, faster–Nature commentary

Framework for building an evidence base on impacts of social learning

An evaluative framework for assembling an evidence base on the impacts of social learning. Figure 1 in Social learning and sustainable development, article by Patti Kristjanson, Blane Harvey, Marissa Van Epp and Philip Thornton, published in Nature Climate Change 4, 5–7 (2014) (first published online 20 Dec 2013).

Most of us like learning new things. But while learning alone is no fun, it’s hard to convince scientists, who spend their professional lives attempting to learn new things, to adopt ‘social learning’ approaches. These could help bring about new understandings, and help transform such understandings into development benefits, by helping scientists learn with, and from, a diverse group of stakeholders, including non-scientists, holding common purpose.

Those assumptions are held by social learning advocates, who include Patti Kristjanson, an agricultural economist at the World Agroforestry Centre and lead author of a commentary on social learning published in the 20 Dec 2013 online edition of Nature Climate Change. Kristjanson gives a main reason for the reluctance of her agricultural research colleagues to take up social learning. ‘First and foremost’, she says, ‘is the worry of scientists about the large transactions costs of the “many conversations and messy partnerships” such joint learning necessarily entails.’

‘Yet many of the same scientists also worry about the slow pace of agricultural development in many parts of the world’, Kristjanson says.

Those of us attempting to use science to help solve complex agriculturally related development problems—like how to help hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers adapt to harsher, more erratic, climates while producing more food and lifting themselves out of poverty—need to try new approaches. If we keep doing science the way we’ve always been doing it, we’re going to run out of time.’

This Nature Climate Change commentary includes a ‘call to action’.

Kristjanson and her colleagues say it’s time for climate change scientists to step up—to help effect a step change. ‘We need the “social engagement” of many, many more scientists working on climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies. We need them to help us build a solid body of evidence on the benefits—and the costs—of applying social learning approaches.’

The commentary provides a framework that can be used to assess when social learning is likely to be ‘really worth it’ and begins with an introduction, summarized here:

Agricultural research-for-development bodies such as the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, CGIAR and their partners are under mounting pressure from their funders to link their research knowledge to actions that achieve faster and more substantive and long-lasting ‘development outcomes’, such as CGIAR’s four ‘system-level outcomes’ of reduced rural poverty, increased food security, better nutrition and health, and sustainable management of natural resources. To bring about the many changes in behaviour, policies and institutions as well as agricultural practices needed to achieve such broad benefits, the authors argue that researchers and their projects need to be continuously informed by, and engaged with, many others, including the individuals and societies they are working to benefit, so as to better understand, and more effectively use, the processes by which people and communities, and policymakers and government officials, learn and adapt their behaviour in the face of climate and other changes and pressures.

Among the many advantages the authors cite of agricultural scientists employing social learning approaches are the following:

  • joint learning and knowledge sharing and co-creation are enhanced among diverse stakeholders around a common purpose
  • the established traditions of participatory development are built on, with learning and collective change placed at the heart of such engagement
  • diverse knowledge and value systems are integrated in ways that help us tackle so-called ‘wicked’ (highly complex) socio-agro-ecological problems

The Nature Climate Change commentary provides a table of examples of agricultural development projects and programs that are already using social learning approaches.

On the face of it, the authors says, social learning approaches should help research-for-development institutions become smarter and more effective. But while iterative learning processes appear to be critical to adapting to environmental and other big changes, it’s difficult to apply ‘learning tools’ in many developing-country situations, they say, where there is high uncertainty and great poverty. ‘And we have as yet little evidence of the impacts of social learning approaches on “hard” development outcomes’, says Kristjanson. Scientists are also concerned, she says, about a lack of demonstrated ability to replicate and scale out the benefits of localized social learning.

The authors of this commentary include Philip Thornton, an agricultural systems analyst and climate change specialist at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI). Thornton says that the authors are embarking on a ‘systematic evidence-gathering initiative, using a common evaluative framework to track new initiatives from a range of institutional settings that incorporate social learning approaches’.

‘The practical guidelines we provide’, he says, ‘should help those interested in applying social learning approaches to use the best available knowledge, information and tools to implement and document their initiatives’.

Acknowledgements
Patti Kristjanson and Philip Thornton both lead work of the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security Program (CCAFS), where Kristjanson leads its Linking Knowledge to Action Theme and Thornton its Data & Tools ThemeCCAFS is funded by the CGIAR Fund, AusAid, Danish International Development Agency, Environment Canada, Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical (Portugal), Irish Aid, Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, UK Aid, and the European Union, with technical support from the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

Read
An authors’ version of this article is available for all to read on Cgspace.

Journal subscribers can read the whole article, Social learning and sustainable development, by Patti Kristjanson, Blane Harvey (International Development Research Centre, Canada), Marissa Van Epp (International Institute for Environment and Development, UK)) and Philip K Thornton, in Nature Climate Change 4, 5–7 (2014) doi:10.1038/nclimate2080 (first published online 20 Dec 2013).

A lively article about this Nature commentary was published by CCAFS yesterday (8 Jan 2014): Want sustainable development? Then it’s time to get social.

CCAFS, ILRI and their many partners invite you to join our efforts to create an evidence base on the impacts of social learning approaches. Leave your comments and ideas in the commentary section below or on the CCAFS website.

This Nature commentary article was produced as part of a continuing social learning process — see their wiki here: Climate Change and Social Learning initiative — in which knowledge is being co-constructed through many different channels. We are grateful and indebted to all who have participated in this process.

‘Virtual Kenya’ web platform launched today: User-friendly interactive maps for charting human and environmental health

Map of the Tana River Delta in Nature's Benefits in Kenya

Map of the the Upper Tana landforms and rivers published in Nature’s Benefits in Kenya Nature’s Benefits in Kenya: An Atlas of Ecosystems and Human Well-Being, published in 2007 by the World Resources Institute, the Department of Resource Surveys and Remote Sensing of the Kenya Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources, the Central Bureau of Statistics of the Kenya Ministry of Planning and National Development, and ILRI.

For the last nine months, the World Resources Institute (USA) and Upande Ltd, a Nairobi company offering web mapping technology to the African market, have been working to develop what has been coined ‘Virtual Kenya,’ an online interactive platform with related materials for those with no access to the internet.  The content was developed by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), the Kenya Department of Resource Surveys and Remote Sensing (DRSRS) and the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (previously the Central Bureau of Statistics). The Wildlife Clubs of Kenya and Jacaranda Designs Ltd developed offline educational materials. Technical support was provided by the Danish International Development Assistance (Danida) and the Swedish International Development Agency (Sida).

The Virtual Kenya platform was launched this morning at Nairobi’s ‘iHub’ (Innovation Hub), an open facility for the technology community focusing on young entrepreneurs and web and mobile phone programers, designers and researchers. Peter Kenneth, Kenya’s Minister of State for Planning, National Development and Vision 2030, was the guest of honour at the launch.

The minister remarked that:

Given that the government has facilitated the laying of fibre optic cabling across the country and is now in the process of establishing digital villages in all the constituencies, the Virtual Kenya initiative could not have come at a better time. I hope that it will accelerate the uptake of e-learning as an important tool in our school curriculum.

Virtual Kenya is designed to provide Kenyans with high-quality spatial data and cutting-edge mapping technology to further their educational and professional pursuits. The platform provides, in addition to online access to publicly available spatial datasets, interactive tools and learning resources for exploring these data.

Users both inside and outside of Kenya will be able to view, download, publish, share, and comment on various map-based products.

The ultimate goal of Virtual Kenya is to promote increased data sharing and spatial analysis for better decision-making, development planning and education in Kenya, while at the same time demonstrating the potential and use of web-based spatial planning tools.

The Atlas
At the moment, the Virtual Kenya platform features maps and information based on Nature’s Benefits in Kenya: An Atlas of Ecosystems and Human Well-Being, published jointly in 2007 by the World Resources Institute (USA), ILRI, DRSRS the National Bureau of Statistics. Publication of the Atlas was funded by Danida, ILRI, Irish Aid, the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Sida and the United States Agency for International Development.

The Atlas overlays geo-referenced statistical information on human well-being with spatial data on ecosystems and their services to yield a picture of how land, people, and prosperity are related in Kenya.

By combining the Atlas’s maps and data on ecosystem services and human well-being, analysts can create new ecosystem development indicators, each of them capturing a certain relationship between resources and residents that can shed light on development in these regions. This approach can be used to analyze ecosystem-development relationships among communities within a certain distance of rivers, lakes and reservoirs; or the relations between high poverty areas and access to intensively managed cropland; or relations among physical infrastructure, poverty and major ecosystem services.

Decision-makers can use the maps to examine the spatial relationships among different ecosystem services to shed light on their possible trade-offs and synergies or to examine the spatial relationships between poverty and combinations of ecosystem services.

Virtual Kenya Platform
The Virtual Kenya platform is designed to allow users with more limited mapping expertise, specifically in high schools and universities, to take full advantage of the wealth of data behind the Atlas. The website also introduces more advanced users to new web-based software applications for visualizing and analyzing spatial information and makes public spatial data sets freely available on the web to support improved environment and development planning.

The Virtual Kenya website provides users with a platform to interactively view, explore, and download Atlas data in a variety of file formats and software applications, including Virtual Kenya Tours using Google Earth. In addition, GIS users in Kenya will—for the first time—have a dedicated online social networking community to share their work, comment and interact with each other on topics related to maps and other spatial data.

For those with limited mapping and GIS experience, Virtual Kenya will increase awareness of resources and tools available online to visualize and explore spatial information. For users and classrooms that do not have access to the Internet yet, other materials such as wall charts, student activity booklets, teachers guide, as well as the DVD with all the Virtual Kenya data and software will be available, giving them the opportunity to interact with tools available on the Virtual Kenya website.

Virtual Kenya email: info@virtualkenya.org

Virtual Kenya on the web:
Website: http://virtualkenya.org
Twitter: @virtualkenya
Facebook: VirtualKenya
YouTube: http://youtube.com/user/VirtualKenya

Read more about Nature’s Benefits in Kenya: An Atlas of Ecosystems and Human Well-Being, or download the Atlas, published by World Resources Institute, ILRI, Kenya Central Bureau of Statistics, and Kenya Department of Remote Surveys and Remote Sensing, 2007.

Editor’s note: The Kenya Department of Resource Surveys and Remote Sensing (DRSRS) was incorrectly named in the original version and corrected on 26 June 2011.

Evolution of Uganda’s dairy systems: Popular zero-grazing dairying does not suit all


Evolution of Uganda's dairy systems

What’s needed is to make better use of cow manure to fertilize the country’s impoverished soils.

Is Uganda outgrowing its popular zero-grazing dairy model? Reports from a recent research study suggest that Ugandan policymakers may want to revisit their policies supporting the country’s booming dairy sector to sustain increasing yields of smallholder mixed crop-and-dairy production over the long term.

Before the 1980s, milk production in Uganda occurred largely in two contrasting production systems. There were the large, mostly government-owned, commercial dairy farms located in the wetter parts of the country on which exotic and cross-bred dairy cattle were kept and grazed on natural pastures. Then there were the pastoralists, who kept large numbers of local cattle under traditional management systems in the drier eastern and northeastern parts of the country.

From the mid-1980s, development agencies in Uganda began introducing zero-grazing systems, in which high-yielding genetically improved cows (pure or cross-bred with local cattle) are kept in stalls and fed with fodder cut and carried to them daily. These more ‘intensive’ dairy systems were promoted among Ugandan farmers along with training on managing dairy breeds and growing fodder. This gave many smallholders an incentive to buy exotic dairy cows or to upgrade their indigenous cows by cross-breeding them with exotic stock. Some of Uganda’s small farmers adopted strict zero-grazing practices while others combined grazing paddocks with stall feeding, a hybrid dairy production system that came to be known as ‘semi-intensive’.

As a result, there has been a steady increase over the last two decades in the numbers of improved dairy cows in Uganda’s national herd with concomitant  increases in national milk production yields, smallholder contributions to national milk production, dairy’s contribution to the national economy, and per capita milk consumption.

Ugandan dairy support
Sixteen years ago, in 1992, the government launched a ‘Milk Master Plan’ to improve (simultaneously) rural incomes, farm living standards, national self-sufficiency in milk production, and yields of surplus milk for export. With the liberation of the sub-sector in 1993, when the government’s monopoly on milk processing was broken, many medium and small-scale private milk processors emerged on the scene. To realize the objectives of its ‘Milk Master Plan’, Uganda in 1998 established a Dairy Development Authority.

With the rapid rise of dairying among smallholder farmers, people began to question whether intensification was the best option for Ugandan farmers and whether these mixed dairy-crop production systems could be sustained.

To respond to these concerns, an in-depth study funded by the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA) was carried out between 2001 and 2005 by the Ugandan National Agriculture Research Organization (NARO), Makerere University, the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and the Danish Institute of Agricultural Sciences (DIAS).

The study, focusing on dairy economics and nutrient cycling, was carried out in three districts—Mbarara, in southwestern of Uganda; Masaka, in southern Uganda; and Jinja, in the southeast, which is much smaller than the other two districts but with the highest human population.

Results of the research study indicate that Uganda may be ‘outgrowing’ its successful, and ever popular, zero-grazing model. The results show that Uganda’s booming dairy farming is profitable regardless of the level of ‘intensification’ that farmers employ through use of feeds and other inputs. This finding suggests is that a high-input / highly intensified production system like Uganda’s popular and heavily policy-supported ‘zero grazing’ system is not necessarily the best option for all of the country’s small-scale crop-and-dairy farmers. Even the country’s most progressive dairy farmers, who have adopted zero-grazing en masse, may want to revisit their choice of production system to sustain their crop as well as dairy production over the long term.

Another finding of the study is that all of Uganda’s dairy farmers, whether intensive, semi-intensive or agro-pastoral, tend to under-use their animal manure as organic fertilizer for their crop fields. The study found the quality of the soils on Uganda’s mixed dairy-crop farms already below a level considered critical for crop production and continuing to drop. This deteriorating situation is fast eroding the long-term sustainability of these farming systems; if nothing is done, food insecurity and poverty in the country are likely to worsen. This is despite these farmers having adequate amounts of manure from their dairy cows to use as fertilizing soil amendments. It is likely that Uganda’s dairy farmers are under-using their livestock manure to fertilize their crop soils because they lack the labour needed to save, transport and apply the manure.

RESEARCH RECOMMENDATION:• This study revealed how surprisingly little research can yet tell us about the advantages and disadvantages of African farmers applying livestock manure as fertilizer on their mixed-production farms. We still lack, for example, sufficient comparative data on its effects on small-farm economics, nutrient cycling, practicability, and labour trade-offs.

• We don’t yet know enough about these matters to recommend best-practice manure management and application methods for Uganda’s many small dairy producers. We ought to. We need to research manure management in the context of Africa’s complex small farming systems so that we can offer the continent’s farmers recommendations validated by research.

Download the Research Report: http://hdl.handle.net/10568/257

Download the Research Brief: http://hdl.handle.net/10568/3808

Partners:

Ugandan National Agriculture Oragnization (NARO)
Makerere University
Danish Institute of Agricultural Sciences (DIAS)

Further Information Contact:
Isabelle Baltenweck
Scientist
International Livestock Research Institute
Nairobi, Kenya
Email:
i.baltenweck@cgiar.org
Telephone: +254 (20) 422 3000

OR

Sarah Mubiru
National Agricultural Research Organization (NARO)
Kampala, Uganda
Email:
smubiru@naro-ug.org