| Abstract |
Conservation Agriculture and Smallholder Farmers in Eastern and Southern Africa-Leveraging Institutional Innovations and Policies for Sustainable Intensification and Food Security (CASFESA) project is funded by EC-IFAD and implemented by CIMMYT in Ethiopia and Kenya (Eastern Africa), and Malawi (Southern Africa) in collaboration with national partners, namely; Amhara Regional Agricultural Research Institute (ARARI in Ethiopia), Kenyan Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization (KALRO), and Department of Agricultural Research and Technical Services (DARTS in Malawi). The overall goal of the project is increasing food security and incomes of resource poor smallholder farmers in Eastern and Southern Africa through pro-poor technological and institiutional innovations that improve productivity and enhance the resilience and sustainability of farming system. To systematically assess the role of institutional innovations and technological interventions in enhancing crop productivity and income of resource poor smallholder farmers, the project was implemented using a Randomized Control Trial (RCT) approach where Conservation Agriculture (CA) technologies were demonstrated in randomly selected treatment villages. Each cropping season, farmers in the treatment villages were invited to visit the demonstration plots in their villages and participated in the CA-based technology evaluations. With the aim of supporting better adoption of CA-based practices in the treatment villages, in addition to CA-based technology demonstrations, the project facilitated/strengthened institutional and market arrangements that could enhance resource-poor smallholder farmers’ access to CA related inputs like herbicides and farm equipments. After some years, depending on availability of further funding, CA adoption and impacts assessment will be conducted by comparing randomly seleceting smallholder farmers from from the treatment villages with their counterfactual farmers in the control villages. To make the assessment/comparison statistically sound, control villages were randomly selected along with the treatment villages when the project implementation started in 2012 and left aside with no intervention. This report covers activities conducted during the period of 1 st August 2014 to 28th February 2015. During this period, a number of project activities were implemented in Ethiopia and Kenya and Malawi. This period marks the third and fourth cropping seasons of the project in Ethiopia and Kenya, respectively. The main activities implemented during this pariod include CA adoption survey in Malawi, adoption monitoring study at Embu (Kenya), farmers’ field days both in Ethiopia and Kenya, harvesting and replanting the demonstration plots in Kenya, harvesting in Ethiopia, and organizing project closing workshop in Ethiopia. Adoption monitoring survey results show that there is an encouraging effort in the expansion of CAbased practices in the treatment villages, though it has been apparently observed that farmers have been adopting part of the CA principles than going for a complete package where they need to use minimum soil disturbance, crop association, and permanent soil cover/mulching using either green crops or crop residues. In most cases, farmers adopted two of these three practices. There are few farmers who adopted the whole package on small farm areas. Yield advantage of CA based practices was the main reason for adoption whereas lack of cash, lack of labor and shoratege of livestock feed were reported as main resason for not adopting these practices. Though minimum tillage saves labor, making permament furrows and ridges demands more labor in the first year.In Kenya/Ebmbu, a total of 809 participants (304 male and 505 female) attened farmers’ field days organized in 14 treatment villages. Similarly in Ethiopia, a total of 478 farmers (354 male and 124 female) participated in the field days organized in October 2014 at both districts. During this period, one scientific paper was published in Environmental Management. The journal paper identified potential recommendation domains of CA in Ethiopia, Kenya and Malawi. Based on literature and earlier research results tested the suitability of biophysical and socioeconomic factors that potentially affect the adoption of CA, the paper mapped croplands of the three countries by overlying nine different clusters identified based on the combinations of three biophysical and three socioeconomic factors we have got data at the national level. Results show that there is a considerable farmland area highly suitable for CA in the three countries. However, taking the proportion of cropland suitable for CA, Malawi stands ahead of the other two project countries (Ethioia and Kenya). Like in the earlier seasons, during the fourth cropping season, the number female participants in farmers’ field days were larger than the number of male participants in Kenya. Maize is a food security crop in Kenya and female farmers are more interested to technologies related to food security crops like maize and beans. Number of female participants in farmers’ field days also showed increment in Ethiopia. During the project closing workshop conducted at Bahar Dar (Ethiopia) the need for strong partnership among stakeholders working on CA was emphasized. Accordingly, the Ethiopian Agricultural Transformation Agency (ATA), Ministry of Agriculture (MoA), the Amhara Regional Agricultural Research Institute (ARARI), CIMMYT, and others agreed to develop a package of CA-based practices that could best suit to smallholder farmers’ circumstances. The National CA Task Force (NCATF) has also been started for strong collaboration in popularizing CA and building evidence on the benefits of CA in sustainable intensification and natural resource management. Under the Ministry of Agriculture, the Sustainable Land Management (SLM) project in Ethiopia planned to pilot CA in 45 districts in six Regional States. The National CA Task Force (NCATF) also planned to demonstrate CA in some districts during the coming cropping season. All these efforts show the need to coordinate efforts and interact closely to share information and knowledge on CA for a better uptake of the technology by smallholder farmers. In addition, during the upcoming SIMLESA project annual review and planning meeting at Harare, CASFESA project experience in scaling out CA through demonstration plots and better institutional arrangements will be presented to participants gathered from five Eastern and Southern African Countries including the three CASFESA project countries. Overall, the project achievement during this reporting period was good. We still have one more month to wrap up activities not finished yet. The final project technical report will be submitted by July 2015 (four months after the end of the project). |
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