The use of participatory approaches, based on an active partnership between farmers and development workers, such as researchers or extension workers, can help you overcome these limitations.

What Type of Approach Should I Use?

There are many ways that you can work with farmers. These range from simply consulting with them to forming partnerships which result in active decision-making by farmers. The 'right' type of relationship between you and farmers will depend on your goals.

Consulting with Farmers

In some situations, it is appropriate for development workers to simply consult with farmers to better understand their needs or their reasons for selecting one technology option instead of another. Renting a farmer's field and asking the farmers' opinions about the trials you plant, for example, may be appropriate for screening a large number of new maize varieties to identify a smaller range of varieties for future farmer evaluation. In this kind of partnership, farmers provide information but development workers make the selection.

Active Decision-Making by Farmers

In many situations, it is more appropriate for development workers and farmers to work together to solve complex problems, such as livestock feed shortages in the dry season. In these situations, you need the active, decision-making involvement of farmers to be able to combine their local knowledge with the information, ideas and technology options that the development workers have to offer. In this kind of partnership, the farmers and development workers should work together to decide which technology options to test, how to test them, and how to adapt and integrate them on their farms.

 Figure 1. A Participatory Approach that has Worked for Us

Main Elements of a Participatory Approach

Selecting Villages

Your first decision is to choose one or more villages where you can start working with farmers. How can you do this?

In our experience, many projects have encountered problems because they selected villages for their convenience rather than considering which villages have the highest potential to benefit from the skills, knowledge and technologies that the project had to offer.

Some development workers are assigned to work in a particular village and have no choice in this matter. Others may be able to select from a range of villages so will need to think about site selection very carefully to ensure they have best chance of encouraging impacts to emerge and of achieving their social goals (such as poverty alleviation).

The questions in the following table will help you make this decision.

Agreeing on Issues: Participatory Diagnosis

You have now selected one or more villages where you would like to work, but it is only you who has concluded that there are issues that can be solved with your help. You cannot be sure that the farmers will draw the some conclusion.

They will only be interested in working with you if they feel that this issue is more important and pressing than others they face at this time.

Participatory diagnosis (PD) is a method which helps the farmers make this decision. In a participatory diagnosis, the farmers meet to:

Participatory diagnosis is often the first time that a village experiences being equal partners in the development process. It helps to build trust and understanding between farmers and the development worker. The outcome of a PD is an understanding between you and the village on which problems to solve, and how you will work together to find solutions. More information on how to conduct a PD and on the tools you can use are contained in the book from which this article has been extracted.

Searching for Technology Options with the Focus-Group

Now that you and the farmers have agreed on the issues, you need to analyze them in more detail and identify potential options to test. It is not your role to make these decisions alone! You need to work with the focus-group to understand the underlying causes of the problems and issues, so that you can look for technology options to test.

Often, it is helpful to identify "technology entry points" that provide early benefits to farmers, building trust and enthusiasm.

Evaluating Technology Options: Starting Small

Once the focus-group has selected technology options to test, the next question to answer is: "How do we test and evaluate these options?"

There are three guiding principles to do this:

As farmers test and adapt new technologies they are continually evaluating them. They are looking for benefits, watching for problems and considering ways of using the technologies on a larger scale. You need to understand which technology options farmers prefer or reject and their reasons for these choices. How can you do this?

Reporting Back to the Village

Once a focus-group has completed the first cycle of evaluating technology options, the rest of the village will want to know what they have learned.

If the focus-group farmers found that some of the technology options are looking promising they will want to expand and integrate these options on their farms. Other farmers in the village may also want to start evaluating these options themselves. Create opportunities for new farmers to benefit from the experience of the focus-group farmers, especially through field days. You can also encourage new farmers to join the focus-group.

Integrating Promising Solutions on Farms

Once the focus-group farmers have seen the potential benefits of a new technology they will start to search for ways of expanding and integrating this technology on their farms. With forages, for example, they will begin to explore ways of planting forages in or around their crop fields or home gardens. It is only once farmers have these 'integrated solutions' that they start to receive substantial benefits from new technologies.

Helping farmers make the transition from testing technology building blocks on a small scale to developing integrated solutions can be a challenging step for a development worker. Every farm and every farmer is different. No single solution will be appropriate for all farmers.

You can support farmers by doing the following:

Reaching Other Farmers in the Village

Until now, you have been working closely with only the focus-group farmers. By offering them the best available technology options and using participatory approaches that encourage the focus-group farmers to innovate, significant impacts should start to emerge. As this happens, other farmers in the village will have seen what the focus-group farmers have been doing and will want to start testing these technologies themselves. Very quickly, you will find that there are more farmers testing technologies than you can visit and work with individually. How can you manage this situation?

Sharing Successful Technologies with Other Villages

News of your work in a village spreads quickly. Even while the technology focus-group is still evaluating the technology options, farmers from other villages will have heard about the emerging impacts and some will want to try the new technologies for themselves. Sometimes, the technology options will spread rapidly and spontaneously as has often happened with new crop varieties. At other times you will need to actively promote the sharing of experiences between villages.

It is seldom possible to take the successful technologies developed by farmers in one village and simply 'transfer' them to new villages. In most cases, new villages will have to go through a similar learning process as those in the original villages. You have a significant advantage in that you already have 'islands of success" in nearby villages and 'champions' of the new technologies. These can help you to accelerate the process of expanding to new villages.

Contributed by:
Peter M. Horne and Werner W. Stür
Email: p.horne@cgiar.org