Africa RISING

Basic introduction / rationale

Provide pathways out of hunger and poverty for small holder families, particularly for women and children, through sustainably intensified farming systems that sufficiently improve food, nutrition, and income security and conserve or enhance the natural resource base

Identify demand-driven sustainable intensification options that are socially acceptable, economically feasible, and environmentally sound

Combine and adapt these options to address constraints and exploit opportunities

Evaluate their effectiveness at multiple scales

Catalyze ongoing sustainable farm intensification

Program purpose and objectives

Whole farm productivity Natural resource management Connect to markets & input suppliers Nutrition and poverty, especially women and

children Economic & environmental resilience

Program outcomes

Increase above- and below-ground biomass to improve soil health & system productivity (e.g., fertilizer trees, legumes, N/P fertilization)

Diversification (crop & enterprise) for greater resilience, productivity, and nutrition

Integrating livestock and mechanization into conservation agriculture

Improve water productivity to reduce risk & enhance investment

Beyond tradeoffs

Maize

Horticulture

Livestock

Legumes

Inputs Production Processing Markets

Value chain context

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Strong, formalized linkages

Value chain context

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1° research scope2° research scope 2° research scope

Strong, formalized linkages

Program management structure

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Options

Africa RISING research framework

• Sustainably intensify household food, cash crop and livestock production in Feed the Future focal areas (West Africa, ESA, Ethiopian highlands)

• In line with USAID missions• In line with Dryland systems and Humidtropics research

programs• Farm-level issues to landscape to markets (beyond the plot and

field to consumers)• Integrate multiple stakeholders• Staple foods within major farming systems with links to

nutrition and diversification• Research backstops FtF investments

Context

Research output 1: Situation Analysis and Programme-wide Synthesis. Includes the activities that are necessary to ensure that project activities are able to characterise and stratify target communities effectively so that promising interventions are identified and inappropriate interventions rejected.

Research output 2: Integrated Systems Improvement. This output is delivered via a broad approach of participatory technology development and / or identification. This requires projects to allow for the identification of existing sound practices within communities that might be more widely propagated, the adaptation of these and other, exogenous innovations and the more effective combination of innovations from multiple sources.

Research output 3: Scaling and Delivery of Integrated Innovation. The first two outputs will generate integrated technology combinations that are more effectively targeted on farmer’s real development needs. This third output recognises that, even where such technology combinations can be identified, the approaches used for scaling them out may not always be effective and seeks to redress this shortcoming.

Research output 4: Integrated M and E Process. The programme will aim to wrap the three process-oriented outputs in a firm M and E framework.

• ADOPTION rates for any innovation (combinations of technologies and management practices and knowledge) are enhanced by targeting on the demand from and capacities of potential adopters

• INTEGRATION: Innovations with components that mutually reinforce whole farm performance/productivity produce greater and more sustained benefits than the joint adoption of equally effective single purpose technologies and practices

• TRADE-OFF: Effective targeting of innovations also reduces the negative impacts of trade-offs between farm productivity and environmental sustainability and helps to identify potential “win-win” options for SI

• SEQUENCING: Adoption of innovations that lead to SI is affected by the sequence in which the component technologies, practices and knowledge are integrated and applied

• SCALABILITY: A research approach based on targeting and evaluating SI-related innovations, in context, increases the relevance of findings from action research sites and enhances their scalability to similar strata elsewhere (i.e. to similar development domains and households typologies in other locations)

Research design: hypotheses

Provide pathways out of hunger and poverty for small holder families through sustainably intensified farming systems that sufficiently improve food, nutrition, and income security, particularly for women and children, and conserve or enhance the natural resource base

Research contributes to the developmental aims of Feed the Future

Purpose

Identify & evaluate demand-driven options for sustainable intensification that contribute to rural poverty alleviation, improved nutrition and equity and ecosystem stability

Evaluate, document & share experiences with approaches for delivering and integrating innovation for sustainable intensification in a way that will promote their uptake beyond the Africa RISING action research sites

Objectives: Research

Create opportunities for smallholders (within Africa RISING action research sites) to move out of poverty and improve their nutritional status – especially of young children and mothers – while maintaining or improving ecosystem stability

Facilitate partner-led dissemination of integrated innovations for sustainable intensification beyond the Africa RISING action research sites

Objectives: Development

Integrated innovations increase production & / or improve productivity in a sustainable manner for targeted households at Africa RISING research sites

Aggregated impact of these farming practices at household level contributes to an improved understanding of ecosystem stability at the landscape level

Dissemination of integrated innovations for SI leads to impacts beyond the Africa RISING action research sites

Outcomes: Research

• Wider adoption of innovations identified and tested by the program’s outputs within the Africa RISING action research sites enhances livelihoods through increased agricultural output, income diversity, reduced vulnerability to adverse environmental and economic challenges and improved nutrition and welfare; especially of young children and mothers

• Development community initiates programs, based on the knowledge tools and innovations developed and promoted by Africa RISING, that are directed at developmental goals that are consistent with the Africa RISING program purpose

Outcomes: Development

Africa RISING Monitoring and evaluation approach

M&E Commitments• FtF Compliance: M&E standards, best practices, and core indicators established for

the entire FtF initiative.

• Open-access platform: deliver and maintain an open-access, M&E data management and analysis platform to serve the needs of SI implementation partners and other stakeholders.

• Monitoring & projection: generate ex ante evaluations (e.g. project targets) for a range of farming system and livelihood outcome indicators on an annual basis to provide enhanced research management and outcome mapping needs.

• Multi-scale reporting: provide the capability to support multi-scale monitoring and evaluation

• SSA-wide: cross-system reporting to serve the needs of SI wide roll-up of indicators across the three investment geographies/system “project sites” (Guinea Savanna, Ethiopian Highlands, Eastern and Southern Africa)

Africa Rising M&E Components, Activities, and Outputs

Guinea – Savannah

East and Southern Africa Maize Mixed

Ethiopian Highlands

Program/Project Site Identification Outputs

FtF Indicators / reports by- Research sites- Country / National level- Project sites- Program / SSA

Perfomance Variables(modeling & validation)- ∆Whole farm productivity- Technology performance ∆ Yield ∆ Labor prod.- by gender ∆ NUE, WUE- ∆Revenues, Costs, Profits

M&E Outputs- FtF Indicators- Outcome mapping (incl.

nutrition & market effect)- Cost/Benefit analyses- Experimental /RCT

evaluation - Adoption studies?

SI Innovation Catalogue- Inventory (cross-site)- Characterization- Open access

Project Planning & ManagementImproved insights into innovations , delivery platforms, and site selection

Learning

Data/Analysis Platform

Contextual Data(national/regional)- Statistics- HH survey & census- Spatial data

Derived Indicators- HH Typologies- Intensification Index- Sustainability Index- Nutrition index?

Ranking domains by key AR attributes

A ________C ________B ________

Project Site Stratification(Development Domains)

B

A

A C

Project/Activity/Partner Inventory- Project DB (& maps)

Action Research Site selection criteria- Site access- Existing activity/platforms- Research design- Intervention type- M&E approach- …….M&E approach

Identify action research sites in

priority domains that satisfy selection

criteria

Site Data - Climate, soils, market access, etc- Community/HH survey data - Experimental data- Model input data

Whole-farm models

Innovation Inventory- Standard metadata- User interfaces

Research Site ActivitiesBaseline survey Set up trialsMonitoring Mid-line survey (?)End-line survey

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Communities/Farms/Plots

Monitoring implementing partners (IITA and ILRI and Collaborators),Sister CG centers, NARS, FOs, NGOs,Private sector

Evaluation (IFPRI and partners)

Impact, Monitoring and Evaluation Team (IFPRI)

M&E Coordination Team(IFPRI)

Collaborators(SpatialDev, ABT, MSU, etc.)

West Africa Project M&E

Team(IITA)

Ethiopian Highland Project M&E Team

(ILRI, IFPRI)

ESA Project M&E Team

(IITA, MSU)

Roles and responsibilities

Other slides

Some useful links• Our website: http://www.africa-rising.net• Our wiki: http://africa-rising.wikispaces.com/• Our calendar: http://goo.gl/2m56L or

http://africa-rising.wikispaces.com/Calendar• Our outputs on CG Space:

http://cgspace.cgiar.org/handle/10568/16498• Our presentations on Slideshare:

http://www.slideshare.net/africa-rising• Our pictures on FlickR: http://www.flickr.com/photos/africa-rising• List of all the tools: http://africa-rising.wikispaces.com/comms_tools• Soon, YouTube, Yammer

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Scales slide (Jerry to develop) Map of the countries / sites Partners in each region? DETERMINE LEVEL OF

PARTNERSHIPS Contact details per project Sustainable intensification Individual links to website + wiki + screenshot Add pictures

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Africa Research in Sustainable Intensification for the Next Generation

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