The ultimate aim of the project is to influence the agricultural innovation system by distilling lessons from project interventions and communicating them to a wider audience.
To develop recommendations on project interventions and broader strategies for commodity development including knowledge management and capacity development, the project staff conducts various studies in collaboration with partners including the national and regional agricultural research institutes, CGIAR, MSc students and consultants.
Baseline studies
At the start of the project, four types of baseline studies were conducted in each PLW i.e.
- Quantitative baseline study which benchmarked the state of knowledge management, innovation capacity development and commodity development.
- Qualitative baseline information on the status of HIV/AIDS and gender. Fact sheets on both aspects were developed.
- A qualitative environmental assessment with potential mitigating measures.
-PRA studies assessing marketable commodities, description of the business support services and potential interventions and partners along the value chain.
Regular monitoring of progress on activities, outputs, outcomes and impact is on-going and has been reported in the project’s six monthly reports and two M&E reports.
Scoping and focus studies
Follow up or focus studies have been conducted to describe and quantify in more detail existing production, input supply and marketing systems as well as specific knowledge management, capacity development and gender and environmental aspects. Considerable attention was paid to natural resource management studies, in particular water use; feed resources, animal and crop production systems and market value chain studies. On-going and completed research is posted on the project website.
Action research studies
While the project’s monitoring reports contribute to an assessment of the different actions interventions, more detailed studies are being undertaken to look at the different components across PLWs. These include studies on knowledge management and capacity development aspects including usefulness of Woreda knowledge centers, field days, study tours, training and partner linkages. Commodity cases studies which include description of changes in technologies, organizational and institutional and partnership arrangements over time coupled with cost benefit and impact aspect. Furthermore, special studies are under way to describe the project’s experiences with gender and HIV/AIDS.
While most of these studies are PLW/commodity specific, cross site analysis will be carried out to distill lessons for a broader audience. A special quantitative study across commodities/PLWs is conducted to assess the degree of commercialization and determinant factors.
Promotion of recommendations
Various tools are used to promote project findings for different general audiences including newsletters, website, working papers, videos, multi media coverage (newspaper, radio, TV) and organization and participation in local and international workshops and conferences. An overview of videos and working papers produced is available on the website.
The project has received various awards, and requests for scaling out project approaches and interventions have been received from zones/woredas which are adjacent to the PLWs.
