I thank Paul Hicks from Catholic Relief Services (CRS) and Axel Schmidt for having invited me to join their team for a workshop on knowledge management for policy influence in Salvador. Agua Verde is part of the Global Water Initiative (GWI) funded by The Howard Buffet Foundation. It looks at how to boost the benefits of rain-fed agriculture for small-scale farmers in Central America, specifically Nicaragua, Salvador and Honduras. “Green Water”  could contribute significantly to food security if several conditions were met: 1) better practices in soil and water management; 2) improved human capital through intensified research, better extension mechanisms, and education in rain-fed agriculture; 3) easier access to micro-credits and financial services for water management.

Now, the approach of Agua Verde is innovative in the sense that the team aims for impact through policy influence based on lessons learnt. Together, they formulated 3 learning questions related to each of the three mentioned issues (practices, human capital and financial services). A big first step is the current exploration of past experiences through literature reviews, interviews with representatives of institutions which have been working in this area, field visits to check how past endeavors have impacted agricultural practices and livelihoods. This “state of the art” should be a starting point for dialogues with multiple actors who will formulate together the most suitable recommendations for policy makers.

During the workshop we checked the impact pathway design and discussed strategies for policy influence, analyzed the current process of gathering the information to formulate the lessons learnt, and explored options to approach monitoring and evaluation of Agua Verde.

Highlights

• The debate on policy influence: “Agua Verde is not a think tank that aims exclusively to influence decision makers at the governmental level”, insists Paul Hicks, the leader of the initiative. We want to go both ways: change policies directly and indirectly, through the empowerment of the farmers. While this sounds great, participants agree that this is easier to say than to do. With respect to the indirect policy influence, the WOLA methodology should help a great deal to enable the team to work with farmers on a participatory approach for policy influence.
• The awareness of the team that Agua Verde is a different kind of animal, which requires a switch in mind set from the usual “research and development of technologies through field work with farmers” to a collective exploration of past experiences. “We need to be ready to read, analyze, write and share” says Axel Schmidt, the leader of the theme on best practices in rain-fed agriculture. Everybody agrees, however it is evident that many in the room struggle with this somehow academic approach.
• The huge experience inherent to this team that should go public: One example is an excellent exercise presented by Luis Vásquez on the lessons learnt on monitoring and evaluation as applied in “Mi Cuenca” a former water management project. The report seems to sleep in some hard drives… Equally CRS-led projects like ACORDAR and A4N in which many team members participated have been greatly documented. I strongly encouraged them to use the reports and systematization of these experiences to participate in international debates and go public. One opportunity could be the next edition of the KM4Dev journal that invites for submissions in Spanish.

Possible next steps in knowledge management

With the already existing building blocks of Agua Verde, a KM strategy will be formulated. Our team at CIAT would be thrilled to support the writing process and the implementation, coaching some of the already emerging KM champions on the ground.

The m&e approach could be fine-tuned with a thorough review of the impact pathways related to the main areas of intervention. While there are clear elements of activities, products, results and impact propositions, the theory of change is not totally formulated and the logic model not yet solid. Equally the qualitative baseline and change indicators need more thinking.

Fantastic if Agua Verde could invest time and resources in research on KM, i.e. how will the design of direct and indirect policy influence turn out in practice? Where will be the struggle and what will work? Will the team grow into their role of inquisitors of past experiences and how will they change their attitude towards learning and sharing? Will innovative monitoring and evaluation practices allow Agua Verde to achieve the expected changes?

We would be thrilled to accompany this potential knowledge expedition.

The CGIAR Consortium Office undertook a study in September 2011 to help identify a set of collaboration and communication tools, on the basis of experience in the CGIAR system and
outside. They also included the results of partnering with CCAFS to identify a set of platforms and tools to help the program improve team collaboration, and the needs presented by the CRP leaders regarding enhancing team collaboration. The resulting Collaboration and Communications Toolkit recommended for CRPs can be found here.

I had the opportunity to facilitate a meeting of representatives of the four Centers (CIP, CIAT, Bioversity, IITA) and other partners of the CGIAR Research Program (CRP) on Roots, Tubers and Bananas (RTB) in CIAT (March 20- 22). This CRP has been in the intensive process of establishing the foundations for results based management, thus dealing with impact pathways. In this workshop, the focus were flagship products and their pathways through intermediate development outcomes, with the end of improving the CRP Research impact on livelihoods. RTB is looking to answer difficult questions regarding what it entails to implement results based management “for real”. The team has been leading with the concept of “flagship products” as a way to “encompass the big ideas for RTB research and research results” and “ to go beyond a simple aggregation of the current product portfolio within themes, toward rational cross-theme, cross- center and cross-crop products and outcomes” (Graham Thiele, RTB Director). RTB has already influenced Consortium-level thinking on the inclusion of flagships as an indicator in annual performance monitoring.

During the workshop, participants from the 4 centers and the 4 main RTB crops (potato, cassava, plantain and yam) presented the flagships they have been drafting for a couple months now, and the workshop team “chose” four of these to work on, as examples for the further development of the complete RTB Flagships Portfolio. We aspired to also discuss and achieve a better understanding of the shift to results- based management and the set of RTB Intermediate Development Outcomes (IDOs), and then, necessarily, concepts of impact pathways.

Key issues and “food for thought” came out in the discussions- most of them are related to the “big questions” of research for development initiatives: when does research “finish” and development “begin”? How can we trace the contributions of science to development, that is, from our “flagships” (big products) through next users and partnerships, all the way to final effects on our beneficiaries and their environment? Where can we quantify, and what other ways can we use to “connect” what we do with what is happening beyond our pilot sites (or areas of direct influence)?

We discussed some of these “big issues” in the context of RTB and its implementation of results based management, here are my favorite ones:

Partnerships vis-à-vis attribution of impact

We want to (need to!) work in partnerships, yes. According to the simplest definition in Perspectives on Partnerships Literature Review (Horton, Prain and Thiele, 2009), “partnerships are collaborative relationships between organizations that are pursuing common objectives” When truly working towards common objectives- how to separate the effects into neat little attributable boxes? This will be a challenge, especially as the collaboration grows to include more and more varied partners: while part of our theory of change is that if many different organizations work in partnership, together we will be more likely to have impact. This works inversely to our capacity to monitor, evaluate and eventually attribute this impact to RTB (or any other (especially research) program). Our ability to pinpoint the extent of our “results” (in this case IDOs and System Level Outcomes achieved), which is at the core of results based management, is then made more difficult by rich partnerships, how will we find this middle ground?

Products: offer vs. demand

A lot of work is going on now (and not only in RTB!) aimed at resolving how to harmonize the work we are already doing, that is already in our portfolios, expertise and thus where we have the most comparative advantage with a few well- designed flagships that address a strong demand/ need from, well, the whole world out there? During this workshop, I observed with happiness that RTB scientists (most of the ones here, at least), definitely its leaders and Jacqueline Ashby and Anne Marie Izac of the Consortium, who were here again helping us, all realize that this is an organic process. That a quick, forced “retrofit” is not the answer here and that indeed, there is no easy answer to this. There was recognition in the group that slowly but surely, we will find and be able to really run with those few but hardy products that are needed for contributing to solve at least one of the System- Level Outcomes, and where we also have the scientific lead! Some of the flagships we progressed on during this workshop are sure starting to look like it.

Funding needed for upstream and downstream research

This is definitely another issue that is not limited to RTB, but that is crucial when thinking about results- based design and funding “pull”. Of course it will be easier to make the funding case for not-too-resource-demanding products that have already been advanced, and that are already either being used, being adopted or even showing outcomes, and where we have strong partners and a good history of work, that is: very “downstream” (referring to the production pipeline) products. And it will be harder to justify the funds for blue sky, “upstream”, lab-based, lengthy research products, products that still haven’t proved their mettle and usually don’t even have their potential so clearly mapped out… but that are the heart of what we do in the CGIAR, and may be the only way for us to continue researching. One of the opportunities here lies in forging strong public-private partnerships which address the issue of funding research, but this comes with problems of its own, such as ownership of the results.  Another partial solution is to make an effort to “map out” the connections between blue-sky research and outcomes very well, to justify investment. This also has influence on the way we are designing impact evaluations: how to make sure the connections between the funding and the results emphasize the role of research.

These conundrums of course remain “unanswered”, and will keep coming back as we “cycle” our way to outcomes with the CRPs. An RTB’s well implemented results- based management, combined with their commitment to outcomes and impact, and what has been a careful consideration of the roles of gender research, capacity building and knowledge sharing in impact pathways, will surely contribute to answer these questions.

La Iniciativa de Fortalecimiento de Capacidades y Gestión del Conocimiento del CIAT se ha vinculado al equipo multidisciplinario que integra el Convenio entre el Ministerio de Agricultura de Colombia y el CIAT para fortalecer la capacidad de adaptación del sector agropecuario a la variabilidad y al cambio climático, con el propósito de contribuir al cumplimiento de los objetivos de dicho Convenio, integrando sus audiencias para generar difusión, implicación y construcción social de sentido.

Para llevar a cabo lo anterior, se ha propuesto el desarrollo de una estrategia de articulación del conocimiento entre actores del Convenio compuesta por acciones de:

El primer paso para el planteamiento de esta estrategia ha sido identificar las necesidades de gestión del conocimiento (G.C.) que tiene el Convenio, de acuerdo con  las diferentes especificidades de los cuatro componentes que lo integran:

1. Apoyo al sector agropecuario en la adaptación a fenómenos climáticos, incluyendo gestión del riesgo agroclimático, mediante la evaluación y validación de modelos de cultivo.
2. Agricultura específica por sitio, compartiendo experiencias en el contexto de Cambio Climático.
3. Prueba y validación de opciones tecnológicas de adaptación en cultivos prioritarios.
4. Evaluacion agro-ambiental de sistemas de producción y oportunidades para establecer pagos por servicios ambientales en el sector agropecuario.

Dentro de los requerimientos comunes de estos componentes se encontraron el desarrollo de herramientas de toma de decisión aptos para el público meta, la adecuada formulación de encuestas para uso en campo y estrategia de retroalimentación a los agricultores, el diseño de talleres participativos para el fortalecimiento de capacidades en el uso de pronósticos, entre otros.

De igual manera, una comunicación interna eficiente es uno de los retos de este Convenio ya que están vinculadas, además del MADR y el CIAT, varias entidades que actúan como socias de los componentes ya mencionados. Por esta razón, la estrategia integral de articulación del conocimiento establecerá un proceso de identificación de prioridades, actitudes y conocimientos existentes en los gremios y socios, así como identificar herramientas de G.C. (i.e. portales de información, bases de datos) existentes para evitar la duplicación de esfuerzos. A partir de allí se quieren alcanzar soluciones conjuntas que se pueden transferir / escalar con productores, mediante el desarrollo de recursos de aprendizaje en función de la audiencia (contenido de cursos, videos didácticos, multimedia, folletos, manuales, etc).

Otra de las metas de la estrategia es la implementación de actividades de monitoreo y evaluación, mediante la metodología de senderos de impacto. Esto permitirá la recopilación de historias de éxito o fracasos pasadas (cuáles han funcionado en el pasado y por qué), del proceso actual de investigación-implementación, de los cambios en los paisajes y en las percepciones de los actores. Para esto será necesario llevar a cabo entrevistas, cuestionarios con científicos, agrónomos, habitantes, productores e identificar las historias de cambio significativo. De igual modo se desarrollará un espacio virtual para asegurar el acceso abierto a la documentación.

La estrategia integral de articulación del conocimiento ya empezó a caminar pero antes de dar sus primeros pasos estableció cuáles serían sus factores de éxito:

• Establecimiento de una comunidad de práctica en la que participen los comunicadores de los gremios vinculados al Convenio.
• Participación activa de los investigadores vinculados al Convenio, como fuentes de información, gestores de contenido y lectores críticos de los mensajes difundidos.
• Interacción eficiente con el MADR y los demás socios para la rápida difusión de la información y para que promueva los contenidos a través de sus canales institucionales.
• Transparencia para informar a los distintos públicos de una manera veraz, tanto internos, como externos.

Se espera que esta estrategia fortalezca la integración entre los diferentes equipos del CIAT, así como entre el CIAT y sus socios, promueva la sistematización de las lecciones aprendidas, asegure un manejo de calidad de los datos y apoye procesos de colaboración virtual y presencial.

El lunes 18 de marzo se realizó el Día de los Medios Sociales (Social Media Day) en la sala Sinú del CIAT, con el fin de compartir ideas exitosas, innovaciones y buenas prácticas en el uso de estas herramientas tecnológicas.

La jornada fue

promovida por Comunicaciones Corporativas, conjuntamente con la Iniciativa de Fortalecimiento de Capacidades. Por la mañana tuvimos una charla con Víctor Solano (@solano), especialista en medios sociales y autor de “Comunicación?”, uno de los blogs más consultados de Colombia (http://victorsolano.com/) y un panel para socializar experiencias de aprendizaje de compañeros del CIAT que ya han recorrido un camino cubriendo eventos, haciendo videos (www.jove.com/video/3047/characterizing-herbivore-resistance-mechanisms-spittlebugs-on) y reportando avances de investigación en sus blogs ( www.futuro-orinoquia.org / http://ciatblogs.cgiar.org/suelos) y otros medios sociales (twitter.com/FuturoOrinoquia - www.facebook.com/terra.i.org - twitter.com/CIAT_DAPA . Por la tarde se llevaron a cabo talleres prácticos (ver agenda).

El propósito de este día fue motivar para que más y más personas, desde sus áreas y programas de investigación, participen activamente en el desarrollo de contenidos y compartan los resultados e impactos de investigación con sus pares, se relacionen con donantes y otros interesados directos.

Este evento estuvo dirigido a los funcionarios del CIAT, investigadores visitantes y estudiantes practicantes en el Centro.