adminCharles Dhewa Review Writer
A few years ago an agroforestry researcher worked with the Zvimba community to improve the quality of fruit trees in the community. This was part of his PhD study focusing on the five big fruits of Zvimba, namely mango, guava, mazhanje, matamba and mazumwi. At the end of his PhD, the community, including local agricultural extension officers, had grafted all these fruit trees leading to improved yield and quality.
A significant proportion of mango trees were grafted with fibreless mangoes whose economic value is much higher since they can be processed into juices and other products. Many varieties of matamba, mazumwi, mazhanje and guava were identified, characterised and improved. After completing his PhD, the researcher never came back to find out what the community was now doing with both the trees and fruits.
But as a result of his work, there has been an abundance of these fruits in Zvimba and the local community does not know what to do with the surplus commodity. While some have tried to export the fruit to Botswana, this has not provided a lasting solution. Every season farmers sell a bucket of these fruits for less than one dollar.
Problems with a fragmented knowledge system
This is a true story which demonstrates the dilemma of our fragmented knowledge systems. Our economy is being held back by different, sometimes conflicting, ways of defining knowledge and evidence. Economists are interested in the cost of production, environmentalists are keen on erosion and siltation and other environmental issues, agroforesters are passionate about combining forests and agriculture, engineers are interested in infrastructure like roads and bridges, nutritionists are worried about vitamins per kilogramme of food, agronomists are keen on germination and yield per hectare on the other hand, sociologists are interested in humanity and livelihood issues. We need a robust knowledge mobilisation framework, which can bring together different expertise and skills to support our value addition strategies.
How we define knowledge generation and application needs to change if Zimbabwe is to achieve economic revival and growth. While we seem to think formal education will address our challenges, it definitely cannot account for all the knowledge we need for economic development. A lot can explain why the agroforestry researcher decided to work in isolation from other researchers who could have added value to his work for the benefit of the community and everyone. By their very nature, researchers are more likely to be influenced by studies undertaken by themselves or their peers than by those carried out by researchers in contexts and with tools different to those that they are used to.
This presents problems of multi-disciplinary knowledge sharing.
If we had a holistic knowledge generation framework, the agroforestry researcher would have invited a food scientist and a business researcher to look at the food elements in the fruit trees as well as possibilities of communities converting their fruit trees into business opportunities, respectively. Because the agroforestry researcher wanted to be the first one to gather and publish his work as something entirely new, he opted to work in isolation. Our education system is designed to promote a silo working culture where there is no incentive for collaborating with other disciplines, particularly when one is researching towards a qualification.
In this particular research, working with other researchers would have yielded more value added knowledge unlike leaving the communities with too much fruit than they can handle in a given season. Someone interested in the fruit processing business with the Zvimba community will have to start a new piece of research when he could have collaborated with the agroforestry researcher from day one.
Had the agroforestry researcher invited researchers from other disciplines, the collaborative research process could have provided ample opportunities to develop a new capacity for critical thinking and making choices about how to communicate research. Skills forged in this inter-disciplinary process would have enabled the identification of competencies that go beyond a few guidelines, workshops and research communication toolkits that do not benefit farmers and local institutions.
It looks like a majority of our researchers do not dedicate sufficient time to reflect on their own research strategies in ways that can involve other researchers. It is through dialogue with a wider audience that the nuances of opportunities and challenges that exist in generating and sharing research with local communities can be better understood.
Making sure other researchers and communities understand the research process and results can be a powerful sustainability strategy. If researchers do not take the trouble to involve communities all the way, ordinary people and policy makers are left with the impression that research findings are so simple that they can be explained with a few statements and facts. This creates a false sense of understanding and power when in fact research issues are so complex that it may not be possible to ever know all there is about the problems and solutions under consideration.
Communicating a complicated solution is much easier when all parties understand the problem that is being tackled. This certainly works when all parties understand that a problem is complex and therefore it is impossible to know all there is about it. For example, if policy makers do not understand the complexity of issues involved in agro-processing, the long list of inter-related actions to come up with fruit juice or dried fruit products will be difficult for them to grasp. They cannot formulate good policies of what they do not understand.
Had the agroforestry researcher embraced an interdisciplinary approach, he could have incorporated new team members or adopted new tactics at each step of the research process. He could also have corrected his objectives so researchers from other disciplines could identify with his work.
As researchers conduct their work in rural communities, they should reach a point where they see the need for new disciplines or knowledge from a totally different discipline. This helps in revising objectives as the research progresses — a bit like discovering a road while walking it, unlike unrealistically trying to understand everything before embarking on a research project.
If Zim-Asset is to succeed, researchers, practitioners and policy makers should learn to identify and accommodate new members with skills to deal with new opportunities and challenges as they emerge. A food scientist could have seen the preservation qualities of Zvimba fruits while an entrepreneurship researcher could have discovered the possibility of setting up a fruit canning centre at Murombedzi Growth Point where the local community would bring fruits using ox-drawn carts.
Complex issues like food security are better explained using different disciplines and methods as well as different tools. Most complex problems have a long history that can be better explained by historians. Had the agroforestry researcher invited a food historian, he could have gathered insights into the history of fruit trees and other food systems in Zvimba. This would have been highly illuminating.
Solutions to food security challenges are equally dependent on a multidisciplinary approach. The technical aspects of the solution, as well as the manner in which the solution is communicated, both demand methods and tools from different disciplines. All people and institutions involved should share common elements such as objectives, a common interest or understanding of the issues or ideas at stake. This will enable them to take full advantage of their coming together.
How these knowledge dynamics are reproduced in institutions
Preference for working in isolation among academic disciplines is reproduced in most of our institutions which are supposed to drive Zim-Asset and other national development goals. While there is a proliferation of associations such as Grain Millers Association of Zimbabwe and others at lower levels, the duplication of effort is absolutely mind-boggling. Channels for service delivery and entry points for farmers and other agricultural value chain actors are not very clear. If this is defined, the principle of value chain will be very clear. At the moment it’s a web as opposed to being a value chain. The value web is more on the information than the transaction processes like production, transportation and processing. Information around these nodes is a headache for most farmers who may not know who is the most ideal transporter or processor. We need organised information about production, transportation, marketing and processing, etc. It can’t remain fragmented forever.
Given how ICTs are replacing command and control with respect and influence, most organisations in the agriculture sector are being forced to revisit their mission statements and redefine their roles. While most formal institutions have clustered their work into departments operating separately but targeting the same farmer, each farmer can accommodate information from all these departments at once. For example, every farmer is able to manage all his or her departments like crops, livestock, nutrition, climate change, insects, weeds, marketing, processing, gender, youth, education, policy and many others.
On the other hand, educated people have created these knowledge chunks into fully-fledged departments employing dozens of professionals all targeting the farmer. Currently Zimbabwe has more than five farmers’ unions, some with a range of departments all targeting the same farmer and consumer. We need new rules of entrepreneurship, engagement, investing and preserving resources. Below is an attempt to define roles for actors in Zimbabwe’s agriculture sector:
- Farmers’ unions — While the role of farmers’ unions seems clear, it is still confusing when considered in line with other service providers. Since unions are membership-driven, they should become a local hub for information feedback among their members. This can be their main value added service. They can be a conduit between their members and other service providers and markets.
- Agricultural Marketing Authority (AMA) — Its core business should be limited to regulating market actors and advising the Ministry of Agriculture on marketing issues from an informed position. As a parastatal, AMA should be responsible for consolidating trading statistics and producing reports for policy making. It can also become a technical advisor to the Ministry of Agriculture on the strengths of real-time information from actors. The nitty-gritties of market intelligence cannot be generated by parastatals but by brokers who are in the market on a daily basis.
- Agritex — Given how ICTs are changing the information landscape, Agritex should now focus more on monitoring farmer activity at grassroots and provide generic information, mainly for new farmers or those getting into a particular commodity for the first time. Most farmers, particularly those new into a particular commodity, may not know what they need to know.
- For learning purposes, knowledge barriers have to be lowered so one can obtain the basics before becoming an expert.
- Commodity associations — Commodity associations should be an extension of farmers’ unions. Ideally, information should travel from the farmers/association to brokers to buyers/processors/end-users and back. Markets also need information from the production side and associations can provide this information.
- Horticulture Promotion Council — should be owned and driven by farmers as more like a commodity association.
- Chambers (ZNCC, CZI, etc.,) — These should have sectorial representations from farmers unions/associations, manufacturing, input suppliers, equipment manufacturers, etc.
- However, chambers also embrace brokering roles. Just as with farmer unions, it is not enough for a chamber or any other organisation to say it wants to create one voice for farmers.
- NGOs — should focus mainly on social enterprise so that vulnerable groups are not left out of economic activities.
- Zimbabwe Investment Authority (ZIA) — While it focuses on external investors who want to invest in the country, ZIA has to thoroughly understand the agricultural landscape if it is to process agricultural-related investments into agro-processing from an informed position.
- Knowledge brokers — As a way of controlling costs that farmers and other actors may end up incurring, knowledge brokers can facilitate information movement between informal markets and processors who often find it difficult to consolidate information in terms of what volumes, quality and types of commodities in the market. Markets also find it costly to get information from the production side, especially for specific commodities. The broker can consolidate all this information and share it with AMA and other actors for policy review.
The main challenge is that all these categories of institutions are targeting the same farmer. If a farmer is to belong to an association, farmers’ union or chamber, what services does a farmer get from an association which s/he can’t get from a chamber like the ZNCC? There should be levels of membership and service access. An association should provide well defined services different from what can be obtained from a chamber or AMA.
If these roles are not neatly defined, farmers will continue losing through membership fees. Since the benefits of belonging to one category are not clear, farmers end up trying to belong to all and thus end up belonging fully to none. On the other hand, when the roles of government departments, parastatals, NGOs, farmers’ unions and other actors are not clarified, we end up with policy inconsistencies.
In the existing connected world, farmers and ordinary people should be capacitated to individually construct processes that help them make sense of their world and work more effectively.
The first step is connecting to external knowledge networks and linking up with researchers from different disciplines. Farmers and rural people are no longer passive recipients of information but, through ICTs, they can now connect and participate in knowledge flows that challenge their thinking.
They can evaluate and adjust information sources as well as filter information. They have become part of a learning ecosystem, able to listen at different frequencies and make better informed decisions from emerging patterns. They can also build trust and respect through learning collectively.
Need to understand our cognitive environment
Zimbabwe’s cognitive environment is not yet clearly understood. That is why researchers and institutions are still doing things in isolation. Policy makers seem to associate knowledge with formal academic education systems yet that constitutes less than 10% of what needs to be known in order to function in a world that is rapidly becoming complex. Success will come from ordinary people’s capacity to effectively adopt knowledge in their environment and combining it with what is coming from outside. Our collective knowledge base is not yet broad enough to enable us to solve our challenges or exploit opportunities. If this gap is not addressed, generating reliable knowledge around food security and value addition will remain far-fetched.
Charles Dhewa is a proactive knowledge management specialist and Chief Executive Officer of Knowledge Transfer Africa (Pvt) (www.knowledgetransafrica.com <http://www.knowledgetransafrica.com> ) whose flagship eMKambo (www.emkambo.co.zw <http://www.emkambo.co.zw> ) has a presence in more than 20 agricultural markets in Zimbabwe. He can be contacted on: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> ; Mobile: +263 774 430 309 / 772 137 717/ 712 737 430.
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