All Countries
This is one of two draft M&E tools: a farmer monitoring booklet and an adoption survey for self-supporting N2Africa farmers (or weaning farmers).
The farming monitoring booklet is meant to collect information from lead /master farmers and secondary / satellite farmers receiving an N2Africa package in the current season. It has been developed from a tool already used in Rwanda and DRC by Bernard and Freddy and the national teams. Data collection is meant to be accompanied by soil sampling and analysis of a minimum set of parameters (texture, P, pH and C). At some locations, other soil parameters may also be essential to explain variation in yield. We suggest to monitor at least 300 farmers per country with this survey. Farmers could be randomly selected in a mandate area after stratification based on gender and type of legume package received. This random selection is important, as we are also interested in retrieving data from sites where N2Africa technologies failed to give the desired results. A great deal of the info in the booklet can be collected by extension agents of partners, with supervision of N2Africa’s liaison officers. A section of the booklet is optional, as records of visits and recommendations by farmers or extension agents are not so interesting for the project as a whole, but could be interesting for the farmers and local extension organisations and could serve as a visitor’s book for farmers.
The survey of self-supporting farmers (I invite everybody to come up with a better alternative word for weaning farmers) is targeted at farmers who received a N2Africa package in a previous season and are now expected to grow legumes without much support from the project. This is a rapid survey to assess which elements of the package have been adopted at which scale and the main reasons for non-adoption. This survey will be complemented by detailed targeted adoption studies which we aim to set up later in the project. We suggest to use this survey among the farmers that filled in the farmer monitoring booklet in the previous season, plus an additional 300 farmers per country. Again, these latter 300 farmers should be randomly selected in mandate areas as farmers failing to adopt the technologies are just as interesting as those who successfully adopted them. In most countries, the farmer monitoring booklet has not been used yet, implying that in the forthcoming season the 600 farmers targeted with this survey should be randomly selected from the list of farmers who received a package in the previous season.
I invite you to comment on these draft tools and the suggested sampling framework before the end of this week, so a ‘final’ version to be used for planning at a country level can be distributed by next Monday. Note that in the revised country budgets, there is funding available M&E supplies and travel, which should among others cover the implementation costs of the above activities.
Best regards, Linus