| Property | Value |
| Name | Institutional Process Impacts of Participatory Rice Improvement Research and Gender Analysis in West |
| Description | Lilja, N. and O. Erenstein. 2002. Institutional Process Impacts of Participatory Rice Improvement Research and Gender Analysis in West Africa. Working Document No. 20. PRGA Program. Cali, Colombia.The participatory rice breeding and gender analysis approach used by the West Africa Rice Development Association (WARDA) since 1996, and subsequently adopted by its national partners, can be characterized as functionally motivated participation, that is, trying to understand better what farmers want or need, and to feed back insights to formal research for improving future on-farm productivity. The expected impacts of incorporating participatory research approaches at different stages of the varietal development process can be argued to go beyond the economic benefits associated with the better crop type. “Process impacts” occur as a result of the participation itself rather than as a result of the technologies developed via participatory research methods. Some of these expected “institutional process impacts” include internal institutional changes (such as changes in breeding goals/objectives), breeding methods, and spillover effects to varietal development in other crops, as well as external institutional changes such as relations with other institutions (i.e., seed systems, and varietal release mechanisms). In an attempt to study whether some of these institutional changes are taking place in the national programs in West Africa, breeders and social scientists from 16 of the 17 national programs were interviewed during the annual Participatory Rice Improvement and Gender Analysis (PRIGA) Workshop in Côte d’Ivoire in May 2001. The results show that the national program scientists were unanimous about their reasons for incorporating participatory research /gender analysis approach into their rice breeding program. They believe that the participatory varietal selection (PVS) approach takes into account the biophysical and socioeconomic environment in which farmers operate, and hence seems to increase adoption rates better than the conventional breeding approach. National programs have received continuous, but very modest, financial support to their PVS work from WARDA. However, it has still required an additional financial and human commitment from the national programs, and it is doubtful that they would have continued investing resources into participatory research over the past 6 years were they not convinced of its benefits through a process of “learning by doing.” This is also supported by the fact that 60% of the national programs have expanded or planned to expand participatory research to research in other crops than rice. |
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