The Nile Basin Development Challenge (Nile BDC) is funded by the CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food (CPWF) to improve the resilience of rural livelihoods in the Ethiopian highlands through a landscape approach to rainwater management. The first project of the Program reviewed past research and development experiences with sustainable land and water management in Ethiopia. This brief summarizes key points from the study, which approached the subject from a broadly historical perspective, tracing changes in policies and strategies from the 1970s to the present.
The agricultural innovation systems approach emphasizes the collective nature of innovation and stresses that innovation is a co-evolutionary process, resulting from alignment of technical, social, institutional and organizational dimensions. These insights are increasingly informing interventions that focus on setting up multi-stakeholder initiatives, such as innovation platforms and networks, as mechanisms for enhancing agricultural innovation, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.
In this paper, the authors describe the adaptation and validation of a project-level WEAI (or pro-WEAI) that agricultural development projects can use to identify key areas of women’s (and men’s) disempowerment, design appropriate strategies to address identified deficiencies, and monitor project outcomes related to women’s empowerment. The 12 pro-WEAI indicators are mapped to three domains: intrinsic agency (power within), instrumental agency (power to), and collective agency (power with). A gender parity index compares the empowerment scores of men and women in the same household.
This is the third volume of the proceedings of the national conference on "Water for Food and Environment", which was held from June 9 -11, 2009 at the Bandaranaike Memorial International Conference Hall (BMICH). The volumes 1 and 2 have been produced as separate documents of this report series. In response to a call for abstracts, 81 abstracts were received from government institutes dealing with water resources and agriculture development, universities, other freelance researchers and researchers from the International Water Management Institute (IWMI).
The International Water Management Institute (IWMI) has been working in Nepal since 1986 with the objective of undertaking research in water management and to strengthen the research capabilities of concerned government agencies. The research helped to develop appropriate mechanisms for providing support to Farmer-Managed Irrigation Systems (FMIS) and the initiation of participatory irrigation management (PIM).
The Sanjiang Plain Wetlands Protection Project (SPWPP) supported by the Asian Development Bank (ADB), focuses on integrating conservation and development needs in the Sanjiang Plain, Heilongjiang Province of the People’s Republic of China. The project comprises 5 main components: watershed management, wetland nature reserve management, alternative livelihoods, education and capacity building and project management.
Over the past decades public investment in major, medium and minor irrigation systems has not yielded the expected results. The solution to the growing water crisis lies in the institutional reform of existing social systems so as to manage the demand for water. In recent times, there has been an emphasis on capacity-building of farmer organizations (FO) in irrigation projects. This study focuses on investigating the institutional capacities of FOs in irrigation systems in the Anuradhapura and Kurunegala districts.
This methodological guide was initially developed and used in Latin America and the Caribbean-LAC (Honduras, Nicaragua, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Dominican Republic), and was later improved during adaptation and use in eastern African (Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia) through a South-South exchange of expertise and experiences. The aim of the methodological guide is to constitute an initial step in the empowerment of local communities to develop a local soil quality monitoring and decision-making system for better management of soil resources.
This paper comparatively analyzes the structure of agricultural policy development networks that connect organizations working on agricultural development, climate change and food security in fourteen smallholder farming communities across East Africa, West Africa and South Asia.
The objective of the study was to identify a viable trade-off between low data requirements and useful household-specific prioritizations of advisory messages. At three sites in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania independently, we collected experimental preference rankings from smallholder farmers for receiving information about different agricultural and livelihood practices. At each site, was identified socio-economic household variables that improved model-based predictions of individual farmers’ information preferences.