Antecedentes Referenciales

The second example of ‘unpredictable’ innovation is the history of the crop insurance programme Kilimo Salama in Laikipia, see Box 5. One of the interesting aspects of this story is that the crop insurance was initially limited to Conservation Agriculture farmers, while this precondition was removed in a later stage. The idea that CA adoption would benefit from an insurance was not very strange, and as the insurance was offered free of charge, it initially functioned as an incentive for farmers to practice CA. However, the need for an insurance proved to be much more fundamental for smallholder farmers. The institutional innovation filled a gap that had little to do with CA, although it can contribute to an institutional environment in which it makes sense to invest in rain-fed agriculture despite adverse climatic conditions.

Box 4 Description of a CA Innovation Platform meeting in Madagascar

At an Innovation Platform meeting in Ambatondrazaka a total of 12 people gathered in December 2014. They represented different farmer organisations (FVRVM and FITAMITO) and the federation MIRAY, together under umbrella organisation VIFAM, the cooperative KOLOHARENA, four farmers from Mahatsara and Amparafarovola, and two people from the ministry of agriculture and fisheries.

The convocation and facilitation was done by a person who has worked for a previous project that operated in the BV-Lac context and aimed at supporting agricultural innovation. The programme for that day, besides some operational points, was to select 5 innovative technologies from a list of 20 innovative technologies that had been drafted in a previous meeting. This was part of a longer process of supporting demand-driven innovation, and the selected 5 technologies would later be further researched and be brought to the attention of as many farmers as possible.

One of the 20 innovative technologies included a Conservation Agriculture rotation with butterbeans. After some discussion agreement was reached on the five innovations to be further promoted: a new kind of weeding tool for the rice paddies with limited water control, an innovative way to grow wild potatoes, a way of growing maize in a nursery first and transplant it in the same way as rice, compost making with earth worms, and the off-season, aboveground growing of sweet potatoes. Indeed, no CA innovation was selected.

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The two cases are ‘innovation narratives’, and shows innovation is in some fundamental way a largely spontaneous process. This can also apply to the FFS ‘methodology’. Although it can theoretically function as an Innovation Platform where stakeholders meet and decide on appropriate action, in practice it is deployed by projects to achieve an outcome. One of the difficulties of the AIS approach is to make the step from descriptive case studies to inferring prescriptive lessons for innovation, but they seem to include that the process has to be flexible, dynamic and facilitated, among actors with a shared interest (Nederlof, Wongtschowski and Van der Lee, 2011).

Box 5 Description of Kilimo Salama, a CA crop insurance policy in Kenya

The history of the successful for-profit Agriculture and Climate Risk Enterprise Ltd. (ACRE) starts with a project known as Kilimo Salama (safe agriculture) in Laikipia County in Kenya. In Laikipia, the highly variable climate and regular crop failures are a serious problem for the smallholder farmers. By 2009, several projects were implemented by the local MoA and NGOs to promote CA as a way to deal with the drought. For these projects, farmers had formed groups which were used by Syngenta Foundation to start a pilot project for a crop insurance in the rain season of 2009.

Based on a climate index obtained from local weather stations and making use of farmers’ mobile phones, farmers could be refunded in case of extreme weather. The insurance was only available when buying 8 kg Syngenta certified drought-resistant maize seeds from the local stockist. The stockists were also trained to give advice on using herbicides and fertilizer. The rains in 2009 failed, and depending on the precise location of the 230 initial participating farmers, pay-outs were made. Where people first referred to it as “the thing that came with the seeds”, after the first pay-out was made they called it “insurance” (Morelli et al., 2010). The first pay-outs deepened their confidence towards the concept, and made them eventually willing to pay.

In the pilot phase of Kilimo Salama, the crop insurance was only available for Conservation Agriculture farmers. The idea was that farmers could experiment with CA, without the risk of losing everything. A respondent at CETRAD who was involved in this project explains: “We did a project in 97/98 to promote CA, and after three years there were less than a handful of adopters.

The drought was so strong that people could not invest. And if you don’t harvest, it normally means you cannot invest in the next year, so it is a cycle. People were putting so much work in it, and then there was no result. With the insurance, farmers could adopt CA without that risk. With the insurance, the cycle is broken and farmers can still invest with good seeds and inputs in the next season, and experiment with CA” (CETRAD, personal communication, 05-09-2013). An insurance that started with 230 CA farmers in Laikipia in 2009, has reached, cumulatively, over 800,000 farmers in Kenya, Tanzania and Rwanda by 2015 (http://acreafrica.com/).

141 5.8 Summary and discussion

Related to the first research question, this chapter set out to understand the functioning of the agricultural innovation system for Conservation Agriculture, by understanding the main CA stakeholders, their interactions, their extension activities, and some of the innovation processes around CA observed in the field.

The overview and description of the main stakeholders provided in section 5.2 showed that different stakeholder types are dominant at different geographical levels. In both countries, donors are the main stakeholder group at the regional level, together with some policy stakeholders like the AU and COMESA. At the national level most stakeholders are involved in implementing CA (research) projects, in Madagascar this level was dominated by research organizations like CIRAD, while in Kenya the national level was characterized by many project-implementing NGOs like KENDAT and ACT-Network in addition to research institutes like ICRAF. At the local level in Kenya, there are several stakeholders that are not project-dependant such as the MoA and Lengetia farm, and project stakeholders that interact with the grassroots level like FFSs, farmers and service providers. The local level in Madagascar is characterized by a lack of permanent stakeholders that are involved in supporting agricultural development, and those that are there have limited resources.

The Social Network Analysis reported in section 5.3 shows that the innovation system in both countries is driven by a push from national level stakeholders who, through project partnerships, engage in the promotion of CA in different ways. There is a difference in the type of key stakeholders between the countries. The central, best connected stakeholders in Madagascar are all research institutes (FOFIFA, CIRAD and UoA), who are involved in action-research in farmers’

fields and not so much in dissemination of sustainable agricultural practices like CA. In Kenya, however, ACT-Network and KENDAT appear to be the best connected stakeholders, which are stakeholders that explicitly aim at upscaling CA rather than only researching it.

The innovation system in both countries was relatively strong and dynamic at the national level, where there is a substantial amount of coordination. In Kenya coordination is facilitated by ACT-Network, who is also highly connected with the rest of the network, and the NCATF which functions as a platform for sharing experiences. Similarly, the coordination of CA related activities in Madagascar is done by GSDM, which is also highly connected with the rest of the network, and through the NCATF. Continuity of CA activities at the local level, however, seems to depend highly on project dynamics which in turn are linked to the donor agencies at the regional level.

Although the MoA is a central stakeholder in both countries, they are not leading in the promotion of CA.

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FFSs are also well connected, but only the few FFSs that feature in projects, for the duration of the project. These projects, as was shown in the same section, generally last between 2 and 4 years, and are sometimes followed by a second phase. This makes the linkages and partnerships between stakeholders very dynamic, as shown by the project landscape that changed considerably over the last decade in both countries. Furthermore, the farmers’ egonet showed that farmers in Kenya have quite complex services and knowledge networks in which local non-farmer stakeholders also interact with each other, whereas in Madagascar there was little interaction or coordination among stakeholders regarding service delivery and knowledge linkages. In both countries, farmers are relatively isolated regarding knowledge or advocacy linkages, particularly outside projects. In other words, they are dependent on projects for agricultural innovation and they have limited influence on it through their structural linkages, even within project contexts.

The dominant extension approaches in research and dissemination projects, as discussed in section 5.4, are farmer groups (FFSs and GSDs in Kenya and Madagascar respectively), model farmers and exchange visits/field days. The approaches are based on the empowerment of groups of interested farmers in the FFS and model farmers through trainings and experimentations, which is combined with scaling-out elements through the facilitation of farmer-to-farmer contact. Although the ABACO project aimed at using co-Innovation Platforms for upscaling CA, the approach in Kenya continued to be based on a standard FFS approach without significant changes. The co-Innovation Platform used in Madagascar came close to implementing the ideals of the AIS approach.

Zooming in on some of the processes in the innovation system, as was done in section 5.5, it becomes clear that the semantic variation in referring to CA and its constituents was a key element in understanding the meaning and connotations of CA practices in both countries. In Kenya,

‘planting with CA’ mainly referred to ‘direct planting’, which was highly associated with herbicides for controlling the weeds. In Madagascar, CA was referred to as SCV in French or as voly rakotra in Malagasy, so the CA principle of permanent soil cover is featuring prominently in both definitions of CA that were used in Madagascar. Indeed, farmers sometimes confused CA with outcomes of cover crops or mulching, and the need for herbicides was stressed for controlling the cover crop.

The results show a big difference in farmers’ appreciation of the ABACO project approach compared to the previous BV-Lac approach. Farmers expressed the differences in strong wordings, and appreciated the freedom within the ABACO project to pursue their own objectives and to decide on the experiments, whereas the BV-Lac approach was perceived as more prescriptive and dismissive of their views. An example is that transported bozaka from the lavaka was promoted as mulch, which, although agronomically very interesting, is not attractive from the farmers’

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perspective due to the required labour. The moment the BV-Lac project stopped, this practice was abandoned.

It was found that the uptake of CA changes power relations in the innovation system in both countries. In Kenya, service providers become powerful due to their influence on who can plant in a timely manner, and the strong position of farmers who are used as contact points for the projects, including model farmers, is further enhanced through the frequent contact with researchers and project staff. In Madagascar, some CA sub-groups were excluding non-members from their knowledge of CA seed markets and farm management with CA. The rise of CA also contributed to the tension between livestock farmers and crop farmers regarding the grazing conventions.

From the perspective of the CA stakeholders at national and local level, the innovation system required technological and institutional changes, as discussed in section 5.6. In Kenya, a lack of technology development was identified, referring to jab-planters, animal-drawn equipment and tractor-implements for direct planting, sub-soiling and ripping. The need for more networking and coordination was mentioned by several stakeholders, especially referring to the local level in both countries. In Madagascar, stakeholders mentioned there was a lack of organisations involved in what was referred to as ‘the diffusion of knowledge’. Also the SNA showed an overrepresentation of research institutes and an underrepresentation of diffusions and extension institutes. And finally, the maturing and regulation of markets was mentioned as an institutional development that was necessary to balance the innovation system in the medium term, particularly related to cover crop seeds and inputs such as herbicides.

Finally, the cases of crop insurance from Kilimo Salama (now Acre Africa) and the Innovation Platform in Madagascar as described in section 5.7 show the fundamental difficulties of using the AIS instrumentally, as an approach to promote the diffusions of a specific practice. Initially, crop insurance Kilimo Salama went hand in hand with the promotion of CA, but soon developed into a general crop insurance. The Innovation Platform in Madagascar aimed at supporting watershed development and agricultural innovation in which CA was an important part, although farmers showed more interest in non-CA innovations. The two cases describe successful innovations for farming in general, but were not necessarily successful in promoting CA which was at least part of the initial objectives. It suggests that it is difficult if at all possible to obtain a predefined objective through a largely spontaneous process where many diverse stakeholders are involved. Indeed, innovation is often unpredictable, and ideally an AIS approach should allow for this flexibility, even if it means that initial solutions or objectives have to be changed.

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