Country Outreach Programs—partnering to improve livelihoods

We had a very favorable response to our first issue of RIPPLE. Some people indicated that they plan to contribute articles; this is encouraging, so please make it YOUR newsletter by contributing an article with one or two photographs.

In the first issue, I highlighted the strong emphasis of the Irrigated Rice Research Consortium (IRRC) on innovative research through our four problem-solving workgroups. Another important aim of the IRRC is to facilitate rice farmers’ uptake of technologies and principles generated from our partnering with colleagues in the national agricultural research and extension systems (NARES). This will be achieved through NARES-led dissemination of technologies in partnership with the IRRC Country Outreach Programs (ICOP). IRRC staff will work closely with our in-country partners in exchanging information on technological development, experimentally validating the technologies, facilitating information exchange between research and extension, integrating principles and technologies, and adding value to NARES initiatives on scaling out technologies.

The IRRC presently works in 10 countries. Most work groups work in only three to five countries. Some work groups have been active for 10 years in a particular country, while others have been  active in a country for only less than a year. Therefore, not all the IRRC technologies will be rolled out in each country. The form of the outreach programs will depend on our NARES partners. In some countries, the programs will be developed as a package of integrated principles and technologies, involving all work groups. In other countries, these programs will build on a strong extension program that is in place for a specific technology. These extension programs will act as an entry point for other IRRC technologies that have been identified as a priority by our NARES counterparts for that particular country.

The role of the IRRC-IRRI staff in these outreach programs are to assist in scaling out the principles and technologies by

• providing logistical support to in-country “champions” of  the IRRC technologies; this will include some limited funding;
• providing technical advice;
• assisting with developing support materials for local extension experts; and
• conducting collaborative sociological studies on the factors that influence the level of adoption by farmers.

Also, we are interested in quantifying how farmers adapt technologies and/or processes, and the impact of the package of technologies on the livelihoods of rural communities.

Outreach programs are currently in place in Myanmar, the Philippines, and Vietnam. Plans are being developed for Indonesia. In future issues of RIPPLE, we will provide updates on the national outreach programs and stories on how the livelihoods of farmers who adopt the technologies have changed.

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