Hard lessons learned for the road ahead

1) The most potent lesson learned to date is that to be most effective, a participatory communications and adult learning component should be built-in from the start of a project. Unfortunately, all too often when communication and training are included, they are treated as an “add-on” component to assist project objectives that may be well off the mark. Simply stated, communication with target groups in the planning stage gives a better project design and better chances of making it successful.

2) Associated with getting participatory communication and adult learning started early on in project formulation is the importance of incorporating indigenous knowledge and practice. The adage of start with what people already know and build on what they have subsumes the notion that indigenous knowledge can provide a different understanding and analysis of a situation, such that projects are formulated in harmony with the environment and relevant cultural issues. Experiences from around the world have shown that new “scientific technologies” are not always the best strategy to adopt. Farmers’ indigenous agricultural practices offer many answers and the best of both knowledge areas needs to be considered to meet local needs.

3) A third lesson relates to providing adequate funding from the start for communication and learning components. A rule of thumb estimate is to budget ten percent but large projects may require proportionately less and smaller ones more. And based on the limited evidence thus far, training and technical support for ICT related projects will need substantially more funding than previously allotted for conventional media. For example, in a recent World Bank project with an information technology component, an average of 24 percent of the component was spent on training and technical support.

4) Fourthly, and although not a new theme, building human capacity takes time, usually much more than provided for in a typical five-year project. The most successful of FAOs projects with a communication and learning component have had a running time of seven to ten years. World Bank staff go even further when suggesting that support to extension systems should be designed with a long-term perspective (15 years at least). The continent of Africa, which is littered with five-year projects abandoned on completion by farmers, provides strong testimony to the value of longer-term planning.

5) Given the location-specific nature of the best applied examples of participatory rural appraisal, a “small is beautiful” focus of projects should be at the community level. While a number of communities may be included in a given project, individual attention should be stressed such that each would build on its own strengths and unique opportunities. And undoubtedly, it is much easier to encourage and facilitate the four pillars of collaborative development at the individual village level, namely, multistakeholder involvement or pluralism, transparent negotiations, representational participation, and accountability. Interactive participation and self-mobilization are also best initiated at the individual community level.

6) Planning for gender sensitivity in communication and learning strategies continues to be haphazardly applied, particularly with regard to rural womens concerns. Women farmers are responsible for half of the worlds food production and in most developing countries produce from 60 to 80 percent of food destined for household food consumption. The “feminization of agriculture” means that rural women are key actors on the development agenda. PRA applications should address social, economic, cultural, and time constraints faced by women in producing and preparing food and factor these into the design of communication messages, appropriate channels to use, and best timing and locations for delivery.

7) The issue of the lack of evaluation continues to undermine the perception of the value of participatory communication and learning project components. Assessing and taking credit for outcomes and longer-term impact which rightly accrue from communication and learning activities, such as changes in awareness, knowledge, attitudes, skills and behaviour, should be applied more frequently. Building in both qualitative and quantitative baseline measures ensures that progress toward achievement of project objectives can be measured during implementation, upon its completion, and well after to probe longer-term impact. Inferences as to the effects of media and learning strategies on agricultural production levels - as a result of practice changes - can also be made (e.g. results of IPM-FFS on increases in rice production in Indonesia). In short, we need to consolidate a portfolio of validated best practices to better enable project decision-makers to harness the power of communication and learning interventions.

One way to encourage more evaluation, and to curb the contention that it is such a time consuming process, is to choose and apply only those PRA tools that will yield useful information; and the turn-around time for baseline quantitative surveys can be reduced by choosing smaller, but representative, samples and asking only what needs to be asked for formulating a communication and training strategy.

The issue of evaluation is taking on mounting importance since the day is rapidly approaching when donors will want hard evidence of the results of their project investments. Anecdotal, narrative descriptions of outcomes and impacts will no longer do. Results-Based Management or RBM which sets specific inputs, activities, outputs, outcomes, and impact performance indicators is already being applied by a number of bilateral and UN agencies. Many, if not most, development agencies will follow. Mainstreaming gender into RBM and factoring it into the evaluation grid of project indicators is another very positive step in this movement.

8) The question of how to best achieve sustainability following project completion remains a constant challenge but some answers are starting to emerge. Among these:

• a community focus with beneficiary participation is essential for setting achievable project objectives and creating local buy-in from the start;

• extension communication and learning approaches should build on indigenous know-how and consult research on technical problems for which there are no effective local solutions available;

• sufficient time should be allotted to routinise project objectives;

• follow-on activities should use local resources (staff, media equipment and facilities) and fall within the means of extension, and the community, to afford them.

Experience has clearly demonstrated that researchers, educators, extensionists, communicators, and farmers must act as a dynamic unit in synergizing and complementing each other toward getting the best out of methods and practices of participatory communication and learning. This implies each sector taking the lead at a given stage (e.g, communicators facilitating PRA; farmers setting development priorities and their information and training needs; extension and media producers packaging research recommendations; skills training provided by educators and extension workers; and farmers training other farmers), but all working toward a common set of objectives.

Most of the guidelines developed for participatory communication and adult learning thus far have been accumulated over three decades. The current rush to network the rural areas of the developing world, and to apply the inherent global resources of the Internet toward meaningful community progress, would be well served by observing the rather more slowly accrued hard-earned lessons from traditional learning approaches gradually incorporating emerging communication technologies.