Contributions

FP3.7 Partnerships

Core CGIAR partners of FP3 are ICARDA, IWMI, ICRISAT, IITA, ICRAF, and Bioversity. However, other partners include CRPs MAIZE, WHEAT, WLE, FTA, PIM and RICE. Non-CG Center partners include FAO, UNEP, USAID, USDA, GEF, IFAD, CARE, AFESD and GIZ. FP3 will continue to foster strong partnerships with national programs of the participating countries, as well as with SROs such as CORAF/WECARD in West Africa. FP3 will also maintain current partnerships with advanced research institutions (CSIRO, CIRAD and IRD), organizations and collaborative research programs such as the USAID-funded Feed the Future Legume Innovation Lab.

FP3.8 Climate change

Options for improved land, water and crop management will be researched under the variable climatic patterns expected in the targeted regions²²⁶. Climate change impacts are expected to include more severe and frequent droughts and flooding requiring a broad span of approaches to water management including rainwater harvesting, storage, better targeted irrigation systems coupled with trials on adapted germplasm from FP4 and FP5. This research will add to what farmers are already doing in terms of adapting to climate change via changing cultivation practices, sowing times and marketing arrangements²²⁷. Studies will be conducted on the effects of climate change x land degradation interactions on soil moisture regimes, the use of different combinations of cereal and leguminous crop and woody species to access nutrients (including secondary nutrients and micronutrients) and water deeper in the soil profile²²⁸. These will be combined with options to alter crop-livestock systems such as stocking rate and grazing systems, diet quality, different livestock breeds or species looking at the income and productivity from alternative strategies that will be developed under FP5 and the Livestock CRP²²⁹. Improved soil-water-crop management will increase the resilience of production systems to climate change and decrease their sensitivity to extreme events²³⁰.

FP3.9 Gender

To attain the impacts aspired for in FP3, members of households and communities will interact with change agents to learn, test, adapt and adopt new cropping systems, options for managing abiotic and biotic stresses and validating different options through an intense knowledge sharing and learning process. A key gender issue, women’s participation, takes central stage in consideration of FP3 activities, as do issues of labor, access and decision-making for key resources.

Some of the GLDC target regions are in social cultural contexts whose norms and practices still limit the participation of women in public domains because of religious or social norms²³¹, hampering if/how women can interact with agents of change. This is despite women providing a significant amount of unpaid labor in seed management, field production, processing and distribution of dryland cereals and grain legumes. With responsibility for these labor-intensive tasks, women experience chronic ‘time-poverty’²³².

Women in the drylands are increasingly taking responsibility to head households when men migrate to urban areas in search of employment²³³, and require support in these new roles. Differential access to resources leads to gender gaps in production, crop yields and incomes. The main source of labor in dryland farming has been women labor, with needs for long hours of work each day (drudgery) as they have triple roles of production, reproduction and community service.

To attain gender-responsive impacts, FP3 will adopt a “DO NO HARM” approach to gender analysis on two fronts: women’s participation and women’s labor. The FP3 team intends to challenge (not perpetuate) the social inequalities that lead to the non-participation of women in knowledge enhancing/access activities. It will design, test and adopt innovative approaches leading to reaching more women with knowledge and skills around new varieties and management options. HE4SHE approaches – working with men to support women participation, will be tested. FP3 will also be intentional in monitoring the labor/time use requirements of the FP recommendations on women and girls and where feasible, developing/promoting labor-saving machinery to compliment the recommendations.

FP3.10 Capacity development

Capacity development goes hand in hand with knowledge management. FP3 recognizes the need to integrate many types of knowledge including informal and formal, local and scientific, and building representative partnerships with national programs²³⁴. These combinations will determine who requires capacity development and who should undertake it. Thus farmer-to-farmer training, field schools, farmer competitions as well as formal training to build capacity will be used. Conferences, workshops and seminars are critical in sharing experiences, passing on knowledge and will be used at country, regional and cross regional levels. The multi-country structure of FP3 offers invaluable opportunities for South-South cooperation for capacity building and for producing results with broad applicability and replicability. Key to the success of FP3 will be its interactions with other AFS CRPs (i.e. MAIZE, RICE and WHEAT) in which the introduction of the grain legumes and dryland cereals technologies would significantly improve the resilience and profitability of these major commodities. Joint knowledge exchange will take place within the integrated research sites and through joint initiatives within target countries that are common to CRPs. This will occur through specific FPs associated with systems and agronomy research in each of the aforementioned CRPs.

FP3.11 Intellectual asset and open access management

The monitoring, evaluation and learning platform developed by CRP-DS²³⁵ encourages open access and is already being customized for use by GLDC. FP3 will work closely with and for local communities. Free Prior Informed Consent (FPIC) guidelines will be followed for carrying out research with local communities to ensure that they are aware of and in agreement with the information collected and its use. This includes names of farmers and communities as authors on appropriate publications when they are part of the research team.

FP3.12 FP management

FP3 is led by Dr Jules Bayala, an experienced scientist in areas of ecopysiology, agroforestry and climate change with ICRAF. He is supported by a team of experienced agricultural researchers, including Drs Boahen Steve, Manuele Tamò and Shalander Kumar. The FP3 team will coopt members of participating partners (Table 7) to bring broader experience in cropping systems, crop production ecology, scaling and development programs, including Anthony Whitbread, Ermias Betemariam, Julie Dusserre, Saaka Buah, Fergus Sinclair, Laurent Cournac, Ingrid Oborn and Göran Bergkvist.