Participatory monitoring and evaluation of new technologies developed with smallholders

• National Institute of Animal Husbandry, Vietnam
• Department of Livestock and Fisheries, Laos
• Philippine Council for Agriculture, Forestry and Natural Resources Research and Development, Philippines
• University of Queensland, Australia
• University of Queensland, Australia

The Forages for Smallholders Project commenced in 1995, coordinated by the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) that worked with farmers in various locations to develop improved forage systems. ACIAR funded a complementary project to address the issue of participatory monitoring and evaluation.

The study site was Curoa Commune located in M'Drak District, Daclac Province, in the eastern Central Highlands. By 1999 there were 95 farmers in Curoa with forage plots, planting from 500 to 5,000 sq.m of forages. Farmers opted for managed forages to augment native grasslands rather than to replace them, providing a conveniently located source of supplementary feed for sick or young animals. Participatory rural appraisal techniques were used within a rural livelihoods framework to assess the differing livelihoods of poor, average, and better-off households. Were the participatory M&E methods used more efficient than conventional survey methods? The focus groups required only two hours, were enjoyable for the participants, and yielded an abundance of useful information for the FSP, including farmers' rankings of their activities, problems, and project impacts, and a set of spatially referenced census data for each village.

The M&E study in Curoa showed that using PRA methods within a rural livelihoods framework provided considerable insight into the diversity of resources and strategies of households in the FSP. The community wealth ranking was a simple and acceptable method of differentiating farm households, and the household interviews indicated that the wealth categories were well correlated with key differences in livelihood assets and activities. The improved understanding of livelihood strategies was gained in a cost-effective way and could be readily used by project participants to monitor the impacts of the introduced forages within the commune, particularly across different types of household, enabling better focusing of the participatory research process on the needs of poor farmers. A joint ACIAR/CIAT extension-oriented publication (ACIAR Monograph 99) emerged from the project: Developing agricultural solutions with smallholder farmers: how to get started with participatory approaches.