Expanding Lee’s categorisation we can identify four main constraints to applying ICTs to resilience.  Two hard (technology, finance).  Two soft (human, institutional).

My experience is that a great deal boils down to one human issue: motivation. Lee’s ICT4Ag example illustrates this, and reflects the broader lesson that motivated humans will overcome many other constraints to make ICTs work for resilience.  But removing all other constraints will have no value unless there’s a core motivation for people to use the ICT solutions on offer.

We describe it as the ICT4Ag prime question: stakeholders ask themselves “What’s in it for me?”.  Unless we can provide an answer to that question, use of ICTs for resilience-building will be road-blocked.

We’ve been undertaking work with coffee farming communities in Uganda, looking particularly at how mobile could be used to improve the resilience of coffee cooperatives.

But, before diving straight into ICT intervention, we first did two things:

a) Benchmarked the resilience of the cooperatives using our “RABIT” (Resilience Assessment Benchmarking and Impact Toolkit) tools.

b) Benchmarked the contribution of ICTs to the cooperatives’ resilience.

Combining those two – particularly looking for those areas of resilience that were weak and in which there was little use of ICTs so far – we produced a prioritisation plan for use of ICTs to further strengthen agricultural resilience.

More details if you’re interested at: www.niccd.org/resilience

There are two aspects to understanding resilience that we need to resolve before ICT-based intervention.

First, and picking up from Theo’s point, is how we define resilience.  In the contributions and wider definitions we can see a tension between short-term stability and longer-term change.

Which resilience do we want for farmers.  Is it the stability of continuity and recovery in the face of short-term shocks?  Or is it the change of adaptation and even transformation in the face of longer-term trends?

If we don’t include the latter, there’s a danger that resilience means business-as-usual e.g. poor agricultural communities staying in a resiliently poor state – of using ICTs to making farmer lives just stay the same.

Second, we haven’t really talked yet about how we conceive resilience.  This has been a big gap in putting resilience into practice.  Unless we have some framework or model of resilience, then we can’t understand how to target, design or evaluate ICT interventions in agriculture.