A values-based approach
AH’s approach to community engagement is grounded in an explicit commitment to certain core values and guiding principles. These are publicly accessible (http://africaharvest.org/) and their substance was reflected in many of the comments and actions of AH staff and other stakeholders we interviewed. These core values included a commitment to “excellence”, “institutional and scientific integrity and accountability”, “service to farm families, especially small landholders”, among others, and their guiding principles included a “commitment to partnerships that strengthen African agriculture”, a “programmatic approach based on developing the whole value chain”, “reaching out and empowering [their] stakeholders”, “ensuring gender equality and benefit sharing from the development interventions”, and “focus on impact and tangible results to the beneficiaries”, among others. This explicit values-based approach served as a public declaration by AH that it was mindful of the farmers’ previous experiences with unfair partnerships and was committed to not perpetuating these practices. Of more immediate concern for our case study, the guiding values served as design constraints for its CE strategy; an internally-generated framework for assessing the implications of its activities for its stakeholders. Although our findings do not permit strong conclusions about its efficacy, we believe the explicit application of values as design constraints for CE strategies is a very promising avenue for improving CE planning and management. In this case, the approach appears to have facilitated strong relationships that helped to restore farmers’ willingness to place trust in new partners, with one another, and in a novel technology and its associated agricultural practices.
Key features of the CE strategy
Four key features of the AH’s CE approach appear to be critical to its effectiveness. First, the decision to introduce the TCB was informed by empirical evidence that was collected through explicit processes of formative research that were part of the CE strategy. Second, CE was geared towards systematically transferring skills to farmers and other relevant players, a foundational aspect of ‘technology transfer’. Exposure visits, group learning, inputs by trainers drawn from within the communities, and field schools were critical contexts for engagement among stakeholders and provided opportunities for authentic relationships to develop, which formed the basis for all the critical points of cooperation and trust that are required throughout the scale-up of the TCB operation. Third, by seeking partnerships with both public and private sector SHs, AH effectively expanded the skills, expertise and experience at its disposal to engage farmers, and help them engage with one another. In the process, it also created opportunities to enhance the capabilities of other relevant SHs, such as academic institutions, public and private research laboratories, and agricultural nurseries, while remaining front-and-centre in establishing and maintaining their trustworthiness for farmers, in particular.
Fourth, AH staff made concerted efforts to keep the promises they made to farmers. In the context of eroded trust, farmers began their journey with AH with scepticism. Kept promises—a commitment to “match words with action”—gradually won AH the farmers’ confidence. As well, the model for the TCB scale-up put decision-making in the hands of the farmers and their collectives, which represented a fundamental departure from the “old ways” and fuelled a sense of ownership of the innovation. Importantly, the AH engagement strategy required farmers to become knowledgeable and skilled through the full value chain of the TCB, breaking old patterns established by previous partners of cultivating farmers’ dependencies on them for key aspects of the production and delivery processes.
Attention to the human dimensions of complex partnerships
Training and capacity building are typically viewed as separate categories of activity from “core” Research & Development (R&D) activities for new technologies. Although this mind-set has begun to shift [25], there are few clear examples of how training and capacity building activities have been designed and effectively integrated with the introduction of a new technology. AH’s TCB CE strategy demonstrates how training and capacity building efforts contribute directly to the development of a human infrastructure [26] to further the aims of the initiative across the TCB value chain. Given the farmers’ collective experience with exploitative partnerships in the past, AH staff understood clearly that their trustworthiness, i.e., the farmers’ willingness to place trust in them and in the technology [27] could be the difference between the success and failure of the TCB. More generally, this attention to trustworthiness requires intensive engagement and listening to stakeholders, even prior to the execution of the project, to understand where they are starting from—what experiences have they had, and how have these experiences shape their attitudes about the specific project at hand. And it requires sensitivity and thoughtful consideration of how all the actions, behaviours, and commitments the SHs will experience in the process of being “engaged” will enhance, or detract from, their confidence in placing trust in their new partners. The success of the AH TCB introduction demonstrates the critical importance of follow-through and maintaining a sustained presence in the lives of the collaborating SHs and committing to authentic relationships.
The AH results demonstrate how CE and the complex web of relationships it produces between implementers and SHs [26] can facilitate a wide range of complex interactions including extensive training, the establishment of new business partnerships and regulatory relationships. The scope of these activities/opportunities and the relationships that facilitate them, stand in contrast to the more mechanistic approaches to CE (e.g., community advisory boards (CABs)), which typically have a more remote and limited influence on the day to day details of implementation. The findings suggest that effective CE must “break the plane” of the typical advisory, or ‘message-delivery’ models of CE to create significant relationships and shared experience. It is through these that sound judgements about trustworthiness can be made, not simply through the proceedings of advisory committees and other structural mechanisms. AH offers a useful example of what is required to make this happen.
Challenges
In cultural terms, the re-imagining of banana cultivation from a ‘back-yard’ and ‘woman’s crop’ to a scalable commercial enterprise introduces new incentives for men to ‘take over’ roles that have traditionally been performed by women. Although the creation of new economic opportunities for men is not, in itself, a threat to the well-being of women, avoidance of this type of displacement and disruption of women’s economic opportunities has been recognized by AH as a central plank in its mission and an on-going challenge. As well, there are inherent challenges for the scale-up of TCB as an economic venture, such as the heavy demand for water in an environment that is increasingly dry. Anticipating, and fairly accounting for, this type of externality is a chronic challenge for CE and fair research partnerships