CCAFS-ILRI Workshop on Communications and Social Learning in Climate Change

8-10 May 2012
ILRI Campus, Addis Ababa

Presentation about the CCAFS program (plenary recap)

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This plenary presentation helped all participants that were not very familiar with the CGIAR program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) to better understand its objectives, funding approach, principles of work etc.

Presentation

CCAFS principles:

• Social differentiation
• Capacity enhancement
• Working in partnerships

Funding:

• CCAFS funding is primarily through the CGIAR (though this is highly volatile funding);
• One requirement is to leverage additional funding - Theme 4.2 resources for partners are under this activity;
• CCAFS is able to fund: seed activities, innovative high risk ideas, proposal writing workshops, synthesis studies, tool development;
• Requirement: partnerships!

Linking knowledge with action principles
How the research is done matters a lot: first identify and involve knowledge users in problem definition; follow an innovation systems approach, putting partners first; build capacity to innovate / support institutional change; manage asymmetries of power.

Baselines:
Same tools and methods are used across all CCAFS sites and time - they will be revisited in 5 and in 10 years to measure impact i.e. behavioral change (though not attribution).
The CCAFS baseline:

• Household level (140 households per site): basic indicators on welfare, information sources, livelihood / agric / NRM strategies, needs and uses of information
• Village level (1 village per site): focus group discussions, socially differentiated...

Implementing in hubs or gender sentinel sites:
Integrating CGIAR investments e.g. 5 centers / CRPs working in the same area (Khuloa hub). Trying to change the way the CG works. The learning loops can make a difference here.

Questions and reactions from participants

• Q: What do you mean with 'tool development'?
  • A: anything from a piece of software to a soap opera etc.
• Q: What is the overall size of CCAFS budget?
  • A: 60 Million USD per year. Some of the bilateral budget that supports this has communication components but overall CCAFS cannot move budget around.
• Q: 60 Million USD is that across the themes etc.?
  • A: 20 Million is 'bilateral funding' (e.g. funding from e.g. IDRC, GIZ etc. that fits well under the CCAFS objectives) over which there is no control. Another 20 Million goes to a 'partnership fund' that can be allocated strategically for important initiatives for the CCAFS agenda. The remaining 20 Million is going to the CG centers involved for specific center activities that are reported directly under CCAFS (e.g. a project from ILRI to better measure greenhouse gas emissions in pastoral systems).
• Q: This is a huge budget! Have you looked at the profile of the CCAFS potential to engage with partners?
  • A: When hiring people, we are trying to bring this on board and looking it as a way to improve capacity for this.
  • We have to think of initiatives that help leverage funding and demonstrate interesting ideas / impact of SL and include partnerships + demonstrate ways in which you can work inside/outside the CG system + innovation.
• Q: Partnerships: How can we best learn from the specific capacities of CCAFS to help us engage?
  • A: On the website there is a lot about this (papers, background information, exciting research areas, look at blog etc.);
• Q: What has CCAFS done in 4.2 to engage with partners so far?
  • A: Output 4.2.2 is totally new, so nothing much has been done on this so far. We've been doing baselines, backstopping work, global visioning database scoping to understand what we have access to, where are the gaps, how can CCAFS fill these gaps (e.g. agric system databases looking not only at land use but what farmers are doing, when they're planting, what fertilizers they use etc.)
  • Information needs to be more efficient in all domains (example of loop 1), but changes in knowledge, attitude and skills are an example of loop 3. What do we have to do in some places to ensure SL happens?
  • Moving from skills to behaviour changes is the important work;
• Q: It might be interesting to have some case studies about how CG members are changing their way of working;
  • A: CG centers are now looking at partnerships and in this approach are also not competing with one another.
  • Getting people to move to practices is a quantum leap that takes a lot of maintained engagement (intensive) but if you do it well it pays off.