IFAD social reporting blog

By Clare Bishop-Sambrook, Lead Technical Adviser (Gender and social inclusion) and Johanna Pennarz, Lead Evaluation Officer

IFAD’s gender team has been the first to respond to a challenge issued by the Independent Office of Evaluation (IOE). In recent years, IOE has called on IFAD to be more ambitious than aiming to be ‘moderately satisfactory’ on various aspects of IFAD's performance, most recently in their comments on the Annual Report on IFAD’s Development Effectiveness. The gender team has taken up the challenge and set itself more demanding targets for addressing gender issues during project design.

For IFAD10, the gender target for design is to ensure that at least 90 per cent of project designs are rated as partial gender mainstreaming (moderately satisfactory = 4) or better, that at least 50 per cent achieve full gender mainstreaming (satisfactory = 5) and at least 15 per cent are gender-transformative (highly satisfactory = 6).

Why have we done this?

Studies have shown that in contexts where there is greater gender equality, performance is higher  – whether it is at a project level in terms of more sustainable benefits or at a national level in terms of higher rates of economic growth. So it is appropriate to push for higher ratings on gender in all aspects of project design and implementation because better outcomes in terms of women’s empowerment and gender equality will contribute to better project performance and impact on poverty, making a real difference to the lives of women and men.

To achieve higher scores, IFAD will need to move beyond promoting women’s economic empowerment, decision making and workload reduction. In addition, we will have to address the underlying deeply rooted causes of gender inequality. This will include highly significant changes in:

• values, norms and practices
• awareness, consciousness and confidence
• improved (and lasting) access to resources and opportunities
• enabling policies, laws and institutions.

The IFAD gender marker - based on IFAD’s six point rating system of performance - provides more details of what this means in terms of project design:

• Moderately satisfactory (rating = 4): Partial gender mainstreaming: where gender considerations have been mainstreamed in a limited number of aspects of component design
• Satisfactory (rating = 5): Full gender mainstreaming: where the commitment to gender equality is fully integrated within the component activities and is reflected in the allocation of financial and human resources, as well as in the operational measures and procedures.
• Highly satisfactory (rating = 6): Gender transformative approaches and impacts: where activities go beyond addressing the symptoms of gender inequality to tackling the underlying social norms, attitudes, behaviours and social systems.

Where do we stand at present?

The data show that we are competent at partial gender mainstreaming at all stages of the project cycle (from design through to completion). However, once we look at disaggregated data indicating how many projects achieved a rating of 5 (full gender mainstreaming) or 6 (gender transforamative interventions), it is evident that - in the majority of projects - we are not yet designing for, or achieving, interventions that are likely to fundamentally transform gender relatons or achieve sustainable gender equality impacts.

Identifying pathways towards gender transformative changes

To better understand how to make projects more transformative, the PTA gender desk joined forces with IOE and PTA colleagues to develop theories of change for gender interventions in the main thematic contexts of IFAD-supported operations. Nutrition and youth were addressed as cross-cutting issues (see box).

Participants at a half-day workshop held in September explored how transformative change can be more systematically promoted within the thematic areas where IFAD is engaged. Six thematic groups - hosted by PTA technical specialists and IOE theory of change experts – developed detailed pathways for transformative change. The discussion was initially based on case studies of IFAD-supported projects and then widened to include additional actions or assumptions to trace through the intervention logic. Attention was paid to drawing up the sequencing of actions and results, the causal linkages and – where applicable - any feedback loops. The discussion placed particular emphasis on how transformative outcomes and changes could be achieved.

Groups discussed how these actions have:

• empowered women, and on what aspects (linking to the three objectives of IFAD’s gender policy: economic empowerment; voice and representation; equitable workload balance)
• addressed underlying causes of gender inequality, exclusion and discrimination.

This highly participatory process generated a greater understanding of the key assumptions that tend to inform the design of interventions, as well as the key factors enabling or hindering achievement of gender transformative results. Gaps - in terms of missing links or actions that would be required to enable truly transformative changes to occur - were also highlighted.

The benefits of a holistic approach

The experiences of the workshop demonstrated the importance of thinking through the logic of development interventions − and understanding their more complex inter-relationships − to ensure we are offering a coherent package of support to contribute to meaningful change. This holistic approach will be essential to push forward on the gender agenda to achieve the more ambitious targets set for gender design in IFAD10. Practical support from the PTA gender team and the two regional gender coordinators in sub-Saharan Africa is set out in the new five-point pathway for gender mainstreaming in IFAD10 (link). This includes participation on missions, technical support on analysis and design, capacity development on gender transformative approaches, and knowledge sharing and learning events.

If you want to keep up with the gender agenda in IFAD, sign up for the bi-monthly IFAD gender newsletter and take part in the monthly gender breakfasts (mail to: gender@ifad.org).

What is a Farmer Field School?

A Farmer Field School (FFS) is a form of adult education based on the concept that farmers learn best from field observation and practical experimentation. A group of around 20 farmers who share a common interest, such as cassava production or poultry farming, come together to follow the seasonal cycle of the specific crop or livestock that is studied. One of the main practical training techniques is a demonstration plot that serves as a ‘classroom’ for testing new methods under similar conditions to the farmers’ own plots. In some cases a control plot is also established to compare the new practices with the traditional ones. Some farmers immediately apply the new methods to their own fields. Others wait to be convinced by the results of the demonstration plot.

Farmer Field Schools in Zanzibar

Historically, Zanzibar island was an important trade centre for spices and crops, but the local population benefited very little from this. Today the majority of the island’s 1.3 million inhabitants are still subsistence farmers working on small farms of 2-3 hectares. More than half of them live on less than a dollar a day. The Government of Zanzibar — supported by the UN’s International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) decided that education was the key to improving their lives.

Farmer Field Schools were introduced to Zanzibar as a pilot project in 1996 as a way to empower the rural poor, especially women and youth, to improve their crop and livestock production by learning and practising new technologies and sharing their local know-how. Since then bookkeeping, awareness of HIV and AIDS, nutrition and gender equality have also been included in the curriculum.

By 2016, more than 1,200 Farmer Field School groups had been established in Zanzibar, with more than 28,000 farming families participating. Almost two thirds of them are women.

These schools have been so successful in increasing farmers’ incomes, that the local government now insist that all rural development projects include this approach.

Impact of Farmer Field Schools

The 2016 GEM Report looks at the way that education and agricultural extension programmes can help increase agricultural productivity. It reports on a recent review of 92 evaluations of farmer field schools which found that they increased their crop yields by 13% and their net income by 19%. Pesticide use by those participating reduced by 17%.

IFAD’s experience has seen Farmer Field School participants practicing a crop-livestock integration system where the crop waste products are used to feed animals while manure is used to improve soil fertility.

Not just any school will do, of course. The best results come when facilitators of the schools have strong literacy and numeracy skills, are experienced in farming, follow a locally relevant curriculum and use the local language.

“My income before was very small,” said poultry farmer Zeyana Ali Said. “To be honest, I couldn’t even manage to get eggs for my kids to eat. Now I’m proud of myself. There is enough food in my family and I am paying for my children to attend university.”

With specific targeting of women students, participation in the Farmer Field Schools has changed lives, families and entire communities. Although most farmers in Zanzibar are women, until recently none of them would have earned their own incomes due to cultural norms. Women would rarely be the ones paying for their children’s education or making decisions in the home. Now many women who have attended Farmer Field Schools are managing their own money, leading meetings and teaching men how to farm. Many of them feel more confident to express themselves in public and are more involved in decision-making in the family.

In this video, Tatu Faki Yusuf says explains that her rice yield has quadrupled since attending the school and she is now an equal decision-maker in her family. She has also been elected as Secretary of her FFS group.

“Before I felt shy speaking in front of people, but that changed after attending the training,” she said. “Now, even if all of them are men, if I want to say something, I’ll do it without fear.”

Farmer Field Schools in Zanzibar have gathered a momentum far greater than expected. Many farmers who were trained have now spontaneously formed their own schools to further spread the knowledge. More than 450 self-initiated schools have sprung up attended by more than 13,000 farmers. Former FFS students have now become the facilitators.

And so, what began as an idea to teach better farming techniques to farmers has now taken on a life of its own as the knowledge spreads across the island from farmer to farmer, bringing with it economic and social empowerment.

In his opening statement, IFAD President Kanayo F. Nwanze said the report was an extremely important tool for evidence-based decision-making processes in the global fight to eradicate poverty and hunger.

Pointing to lessons from the report, Nwanze said that inclusive rural transformation is essential to sustainable development but will depend on the choices made by governments, the private sector and institutions like IFAD.

“Inclusive rural transformation can lift people out of poverty, revitalise communities and offer opportunities to all, including youth, who are the future of any nation,” Nwanze said.

Nwanze added that the report is "a vital resource to help policy-makers to make the right decision and investments to bring about inclusive rural transformation".

Paul Winters, Director of Research and Impact Assessment, and Officer-in-Charge of the Strategy and Knowledge Department at IFAD, presented key findings from the report.

Winters noted that "75 per cent of extreme poverty is still in rural areas" and, as a consequence, "if we want to address poverty, we have to address poverty in rural areas."

Paul Winters, Director of Research and Impact Assessment, and Officer-in-Charge of the Strategy and Knowledge Department at IFAD, presented key findings from the report.

Presenting his three key messages, he said, "Rural transformation happens as part of a broader process of structural transformation and the role of agriculture changes in that."

He added that "inclusive transformation will not happen automatically, it must be made to happen." And lastly that "fostering inclusive transformation is about making the right strategic choices for the country". 

Paul Winter's contribution was followed by a high-level panel discussion moderated by Zeinab Badawi, an award-winning broadcast journalist.

A number of international researchers, policy experts, government leaders and civil society representatives were on hand including Winnie Byanyima, Executive Director of OXFAM International. Byanyima asserted that: "Smallholder farmers must be at the centre of rural transformation."

She also stressed that we need "to tackle social norms that hold women and communities back", and that we need "better infrastructure, roads communication, technology, inclusive finance that would make poor people able to find decent work in the non-farm sector."

The launch of the report is just the starting point. Several regional events have been organised by IFAD aimed at engaging various stakeholders in regional and country level policy and investment dialogues.

To learn more, browse the report online here and follow the conversation online at #ruraltransformation.

By Philippe Remy and Elena Pietschmann, WCA

By supporting vocational training and microenterprise development, the Rural Youth Vocational Training Employment and Entrepreneurship Support Project (FIER) in Mali aims to facilitate rural young people's access to employment opportunities and attractive, well-paying jobs in agriculture and related enterprises. Everyone between the age of 15 and 40 living in the targeted villages is entitled to take part in the project’s activities. Young facilitators from local NGOs work with 4 groups of youth (girls 15-17; boys 15-17; young women 18-40; young men 18-40), showing them different possible professions in their rural area to help them choose their path. At the end of this 6-months process, youth under-18 have the possibility to choose among a range of education options, while young people over-18 can apply to receive the micro-credit and professional training that will help them set up their own (individual or group-based) economic activity.

The repartition of youth in 4 groups allows us to identify the specificities related to working with youth in the 15-17 age range, as well as the challenges of working with girls in particular. It is too early for talking about results or impacts, but the challenges encountered, and some of the approaches adopted, are still worth sharing:

• It is proving harder to reach 15-17 years old than it is for the 18-40 age range. This is especially so if the households are required to choose one youth within the household to take part in the project’s activities. In that case, older youth are generally selected by the households. To counter this problem, FIER adopted an inclusive targeting strategy where every youth in the selected villages is entitled to benefit from the project.  
• Even when the project targets every youth in the village and there is no need to choose among different young people within a household, parents tend to be reluctant to let under-18 take part in the project’s activities, preferring to keep them at home. To promote under-18 participation, the facilitators conducted door-to-door sensitization with parents.
• Youth aged 15-17 tend to have greater difficulties in expressing themselves, especially in the presence of older youth. For this reason, working with separate groups of under- and over-18 proved helpful.
• 15-17 years old are often already running an economic activity and express interest in applying for the microcredit like the youth in the older group. However, this is not possible as minors cannot access credit. The approach used was to encourage them to open a bank account anyway and start saving in the meantime. Under-18 youth was also allowed to become part of a group-based economic activity that included over-18 youth able to access credit.
• Adolescents easily get bored. It proved harder to retain 15-17 years old if the animation sessions were monotonous. The facilitators talked about the need to engage them with dynamic, participatory approaches and to develop games to share information in an interesting way. Approaches such as participatory photography or the staging of performances and sketches seem to work well.
• At 15-17, youth are particularly vulnerable to migration. That is the age where both boys and girls often move to urban centers or, in the case of some regions in Mali, to do hazardous work in gold mines. This makes it harder to get them involved in the project activities, as they are often away from the village. The project also has to compete against dreams of easy money they hope to make in the city. The youth’s coming and going from the village also makes it harder to ensure continuity in the 6-months process. To counter these difficulties, it proved useful to carry out an intensive information campaign involving radio stations, local authorities, and the targeted communities so that even youth that were not present in the village could get information on the project. It also seems important to have a relatively flexible schedule of activities where youth can fit in even if they missed the first sessions.  
• 15-17 years old tend to be particularly impatient. The approach used was to develop a clear time plan and explain them the whole process and exactly how long each step takes.

On top of such challenges, working with 15-17 girls is particularly difficult because:

• Girls – especially married girls – face restricted mobility and their families are less inclined to get them involved in a project that might require them to take a training far away from home. The approach adopted was to identify training opportunities close-by, or even mobile units that go to the villages, and to explain to the families from the start of the project that girls will not necessarily have to move.
• There is a reluctance in investing in unmarried young girls, since they might move away from the village and certainly will move away from the household. Sensitization with the parents is thus especially important for girls.
• The category of ‘youth’ is generally understood as referring to men. Girls become women as soon as they marry, independent of their age. They are thus often put in the over-18 group (even by some of the NGO facilitators), where they face greater difficulties to express themselves given the presence of older women.

In conclusion, some of the main lessons learned so far are:

• Involving the families is crucial
• To avoid the risk of households selecting older youth to take part in the project, targeting should be either very inclusive (every youth is a potential beneficiary), or very specific (e.g. only 15 to 17)
• Dynamic, new activities are helpful to retain youth that might easily get bored
• For girls, it is important to take their restricted mobility into account and identify training possibilities nearby

By: Josephine Reiher (Gender and Youth Officer, OIFWP ) and Monica Romano

Ata in her home garden. Credit: A. Aruee

Life in the rural area of the outer islands of Kiribati can be challenging. A number of families who migrated to Tarawa have now returned to their home islands as a result of an increasing cost of copra. However, making a living from agriculture is difficult as families share small pieces of land and most of the youth have limited employment opportunities, also due to poor education.

The IFAD-supported Outer Island Food and Water Project (OIFWP) came into force in September 2014. Targeting the four outer islands of Abebama, Beru, North Tabiteuea and Nonouti, it promotes improved household food security and nutrition, as well as clean water through rainwater harvesting and community planning and action activities. The project aims to reach the entire population with a specific focus on women and young people.

Based on a consultative process in the  Tanimainiku village, in the island of Abemama, a Community Development Plan was formulated,  and  Community Committee was established to support activities in the village.

Ata Tangatariki, 30, is a young woman, who lives with her family in the Tanimainiku village. She lives with her parents, two married sisters with kids, and a brother who is still in high school. Ata participated in the induction meeting of the project and contributed to the design of the Community Development Plan. She was also selected as a member of the Community Committee.

To be eligible for becoming a Community Committee member a person living in the target villages is required to have a garden in his/her home, which can be used as a model to show interested people in the community how to properly grow and maintain it. The Committee established that project staff would visit the home gardens every two weeks to provide advice and help the farmers. Ata’s family grows three different gardens, which are taken care of by her father, mother and herself.

Before the project was introduced in their village, Ata’s family used to grow only banana, swamp taro and breadfruit because of limited agricultural knowledge, hence their diet was poor, and lacking important nutrients from vegetables. As a result of project-supported home gardening activities, they now grow cabbages, sweet potatos, tomatoes, pawpaw, new breadfruit types, pumpkins and kangkong (water spinach). Their dietary habits consequently changed and they now eat a greater quantity and variety of nutritious food.

Ata also tried to find other ways to support her family economically and found out that growing vegetables and fruit in the home gardens has many advantages: it helps coping with food shortages, often occurring due to undelivered cargo supplies to the Outer Islands and can also help generate additional income.

By selling her fruit and vegetables locally, Ata is able to earn about USD 1.9 for each cabbage and about USD 2.3 per kilo of sweet potatoes. She can also sell the bigger pawpaw and pumpkin for about USD 3.8 each. On average, she estimated she can earn around USD 7.5 per day from her fruits and vegetables – something the family was unable to rely on before.

Her major plan for the future is to do more to showcase her garden products to the communities across the island, and  encourage them to engage in gardening by sharing her skills and experience. She believes that a good way to attract the youngsters in farming is by organizing competitions, with some incentives for those growing the biggest or heaviest fruits and vegetables in the community. This activity has been agreed upon by the community committee and will be commenced during the World Food Day in October this year.

Ata is very proud to be involved in the Project, both as a farmer and a community leader. It has changed her view on farming, improved her family’s food security and nutrition, and  taught her new gardening and leadership skills through the help of the Community Facilitator Officers, the Agricultural Assistants and the Island Facilitators working for the project. She believes that the project has provided a major contribution to raise the profile of agriculture, especially among  young people, and brought about innovation and change in the life of rural communities.

Participating in the community consultations, becoming a community committee member and engaging in home gardening greatly encouraged her and helped her learn an important lesson: farming can make you change your future.

By Tevita Ravumaidama, PHVA-Partners in Community Development Fiji (PCDF) and Monica Romano

Young people living in rural areas have the potential, as the farmers and producers of tomorrow, to help feed the world's growing population. But young people are increasingly abandoning agriculture and rural areas in search of better livelihoods in cities or abroad. In The Pacific island of Fiji, Joji Naikau returned to his rural hometown to invest in his farm and is showing great success.

Joji Naikau, 30, is a young man 30 living in Nadala village, Savaty district, in Ba province of Fiji. He is married with two children, and one of the beneficiaries of the Partnership in High Value Agriculture (PHVA) programme, an IFAD-supported grant targeting 13 villages and 7 settlements located in an impoverished district of Nadarivatu in the interior of Fiji’s main island of Viti Levu.

The USD 500,000 grant implemented during 2012-2015 aimed at increasing the income of the 200 farmers who participated by 20 per cent from the production of high value products, through enhanced market linkages and community empowerment.

Before joining the programme, Joji was not farming to earn his livelihoods. Despite owning 1.5 hectares of land, he had no knowledge and skills on how to use it for income generation. Therefore, he moved to Fiji’s capital of Suva and started to undertake mechanical work for an engineering company.

A few years ago while he was spending Christmas time in his village, he was approached by staff working for the IFAD-supported programme, and encouraged to participate in some training activities to learn how to put his land under production and to invest in farming as a business.

Joji presented his experience at the 1st stakeholder workshop of the IFAD-funded Fiji Agricultural Partnerships Project. Credit: M. Romano