WAVES03Nov
Africa RISING West Africa Virtual Exchange Seminar (WAVES)
3 November 2021
Virtual via Ms TEAMS[edit | edit source]
Attendance
- A. Dissa
- F. Kizito
- B. Zemadim
- F. Badolo
- M. Bekunda
- B. Willemien
- B. Kotu
- J. Kipo
- B. Traore
- M. Shaibu
- M. Cavicchioli
- I. Hoeschle-Zeledon
- J. Odhong
- B. Boyubie
- S. A. Adebayo
- W.O. Duah
- Z. Birhanu
- A. R. Nurudeen
- F. Muthoni
Opening comments
F. Kizito:
- Thank you everyone for joining the call. I was hoping Irmgard will be with us, but it’s probable that she is still held up by a proposal deadline that we are trying to beat for the One CGIAR.
- I am going to give just a few quick updates mainly related to the work plan. A few partners have some outstanding revisions on their workplans, and this is mainly for the Ghana partners. I have noticed that not many of them are on the call yet. For Mali, I think we are pretty much good to go. And for the partners who don’t have any pending revisions, the exhibits for sub-contracting should be able to get to you in the next week or so. In the next two week we shall also release the combined work plans for Ghana and Mali so that at least all partners have these document in one file that allows for easier collaboration.
- We are making some progress with the handbook; most teams now know where they are and what is still missing. There are also some revisions going on. There is a centralized repository, and I would encourage colleagues to put their contents/drafts there irrespective of its current form. That will help in getting you some internal comments for the chapters you are drafting.
- I would like to ask if Birhanu or Bouba have some updates for Mali?
B. Zemadim:
- We are preparing a farmer’s field day event next week on Thursday (11 Nov) - Sunday (14 November). We have started inviting all partners and the AR team like Fred and Mina are also coming. This is the final farmers field event. we have developed 4 technology parks and used them for capacity building over the years. We have talked with FENABE and AMEDD that they will be taking over the parks and hopefully the parks can also be used by us and others in the future. So, these local NGOs will take care of the operations after that and whoever is interested in investing in the parks for technology development, co-validation or even to do some capacity building and outreach activities can contact them and use them as well. So for that we will have a kind of handing over ceremony with FENABE and AMEDD, next week so that they can continue capacity development within these communities. This also demonstrates solidarity with the local NGOs because they have always been part of Africa RISING for a long time so they maintain the parks if they get support from other parties.
B. Traore:
- For the field day; we have a different format from how we always organize these events. Since this is a handover event, we want to involve and invite other local NGOs beyond the ones involved in Africa RISING, national extension service, municipality administrators, so that they can be witnesses during the ceremony. We will start with visits to the fields and then have a meeting with all the stakeholders to discuss about sustainable management of the field in future (beyond Africa RISING). We are also trying to involve other projects so that even after Africa RISING, they can continue supporting the parks. So, we expect to spend some time in Koutiala and visit only those parks.
M. Bekunda:
- I have nothing much except to update you that our ESA Technologies Handbook has now been submitted for production. We hope the West Africa project team will also work very hard to publish their handbook. On a personal note, it would have been great for me to come to Mali, but this notice is too close and the COVID travel restrictions would make it rather difficult for me to travel.
I.H-Zeledon:
- I am still waiting to get the final Ghana work plan so that we can start proper budget planning and issuing the partner contract. We have done that for Mali, so ICRISAT has the money and so they can continue working without any further delays. For Ghana there is a bit of delays and I think Fred, you told me that some partners have not yet addressed the comments on the workplans. So, I appeal to all those partners, please do not delay any further because we are already in November, and we have never been so late in issuing contracts for Ghana partners.
- The other update is from the CGIAR. This month the last batch of these new Initiatives will have to submit their proposals so as you can imagine I am fully focused on that. We are working day and night now to get this done, and we must be optimistic that we will manage and that we will get a very good proposal that will eventually be approved. The approvals will happen in the first quarter of 2022.
Questions, answers, and other discussions
- M. Shaibu: How were you able to measure a variable yield instability in your model?
- F. Badolo: As I mentioned earlier, we discussed certain questions with the farmers, for instance that one on yield stability. From the table below, you can see that the farmers gave the percentage of yield reduction over a 5-year period.
- K. Bekele: We measured the yield in categorical ways, various percentages ranging from between 0 to 50%.
- A. Dissa: Related to the use encometric model, there are usually high potential on for example the distribution of residual and also the relationship between different variables. I didn’t hear much about this from the presentation, so I would like to hear whether those checks were done? what are the conditions? And what are the strategies to deal with those deviations for example the hypothesis.
- F. Badolo: Thanks for that question. We can share with you the full paper. We tried to go to the step by step to do the econometric model. First we started with general logic model. This model usually has problems with assumptions. Next we used the mixed logic model, to correct the problem caused by the general logic. We then continued to use this model to add the robustness and see if the result from this model is closer to the other model. The different step used to do the estimation is explained explicitly in the paper.
- K. Bekele: The first model we used is the multinomial model, which is very strong in assumptions because it assumes that the preferences of farmers is homogeneous. But the mixed logic model helps to solve this problem. One of the problems of these kinds of models is that farmers may not attend to some attributes for example, they may attend to (we have listed 7 attributes) and from that they may only attend to 3 or 4! So, this is the main problem regarding this type of model, actually to sort out this problem what we did was to fit models that account for attribute non-attendance. We measured different variables on this and then we did the conventional model as well as the model that accounts for attributes non-attendance. So, our model is actually as good as the model that takes into account attributes non-attendance. But we learnt from this that farmer they don’t attend to all the attributes, but the attended to some of the attributes. They didn’t ignore the attributes, but they gave little attention to that. So, we adjusted for that.
- F. Kizito: I found it very interesting, especially the better attributes associated with larger grain yield and fodder yield, but also the ability to have this biofortified would be good. Especially when you’re talking about food and nutrition security. I highly suspect that one of the key causes of yield instability could be related to probably drought spells, insufficient soil moisture and having said that; I was wondering whether these varieties have drought tolerance? Also when you ask the question about risk of crop failure, it would be good to know the response from the farmers i.e. whether these farmers are growing legume or they are just monocropping? If there is that kind of dichotomy where you have an overall response where there is high crop risk failure, low risk crop failure etc. If you look at the overall dichotomy for farmers growing legumes versus those not, there are other facilitating attributes around soil moiusture preservation that improve soil health and that really reduce risk failure. So I was wondering whether you have been able to disaggregate the data in this way?
- K. Bekele: Yes, you are right. We also ran some interactions between some variable and then actually those aren’t that important and that is why we didn’t import. Otherwise that is a very good point and we will look into it.
- F. Kizito: What is the next step with this study?
- F. Badolo: I have just submitted this study last week to a journal (international journal of agricultural sustainability). This paper has been presented at the Tropentag 2021 in Germany last September.
F. Kizito:
- This is good. In future it would great to share with me also for additional internal quality checks, although I am aware that all team members have reviewed the papers. Also share with Jonathan for communications and our knowledge management platforms.
- Thank you very much colleagues. I would like us to adapt the ESA model for these meetings next year, where we can listen to 2 presentations per meeting. Next year is about synthesis of results and this would allow us an opportunity to get as much into the work we are doing.
