The Pastoral Communication Initiative, a long-term partner of FAC, will help facilitate this work and manage funds. We hope someone from PCI will attend the workshop too. As you know the first step in this work took place at a PCI organised event in Borena, Ethiopia earlier in 2009. The short booklet (See: Pastoral Innovation Systems) emerging from this event provides the background to our work. The level of enthusiasm and interest among pastoralists at the Borena event (from across southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya) reaffirmed our belief that this was a theme that was both in much demand and potentially of great interest.
The future work will be elaborated in detail at our Nairobi meeting. It starts from the observation that there are lots of innovations going on in pastoral areas in response to a variety of pressures and stresses (climate change, shifts in markets, conflict etc.) and around different areas of pastoral livelihoods (production, marketing, social organisation etc.). These innovations may be technical, social, organisational, but are geared at meeting pressing needs. They are also differentiated – richer/poorer, men/women, young/old – with different groups innovating in different ways. There is not just one pastoral system but many. These are poorly understood, and there are limited sharing mechanisms to allow the spread of innovation even within communities let alone across ethnic groups and across geographical borders. The starting point of this work is that documentation of innovations (in their social-cultural-economic contexts) and encouraging the sharing of them will be an important resource for pastoralists in the region.
Further, the work emerges from another observation: that these more informal pastoral innovation systems are disconnected from formal systems of innovation (from research and development institutions, both public and private sector). This results in turn in the underperformance of both formal and informal innovation systems, and multiple opportunities are missed. Bringing such systems closer together may result in some real benefits, allowing pastoralist access to new technologies and expertise and for the public good R and D system to respond to a wider set of priorities set by users themselves. For the private sector, such an interaction might open up new market opportunities and a re-gearing of R and D focus. In order to test these assumptions, one element of the project will be to bring the actors from formal and informal systems, public and private, together.
Thus the proposed research has the following elements:
1. Documentation of (differentiated) pastoral innovation systems in a number of sites
2. Analysis of the key characteristics of pastoral innovation systems – commonalities and differencesLinking pastoral innovation systems with formal innovation systems, public and private.
3. In our workshop discussions we will design a detailed plan to get 1 going, and think about issues in 2, perhaps developing some concrete hypotheses to explore. And, hopefully through collaboration with colleagues at ILRI, we wil be begin to think about how to approach 3.
We will develop our research together. Beyond these ideas we do not have any detailed plan prepared in advance. This invitation to participate is based not on standard consultancy terms, but an invitation to join the Consortium and help develop this strand of work together. It would be useful to introduce ourselves to each other in advance of our meeting in Nairobi. Could you all send to this email list a copy of a short cv? Mine is attached here(a bit old I am afraid). The team so far is:
- Hussein Abdullahi Mahmoud, Lecturer, Department of Geography, Egerton University
- Abdirizak Arale Nunow, Lecturer, Department of Environmental Studies, Moi University
- Abdi Abdullahi Hussein – Pastoralist Forum of Ethiopia
- Boku Tache Dida – Indepdendent consultant, Addis, formerly PhD student at Noragric, Norway
- Patta Scott-Villiers, PCI, Nairobi
- Jeremy Lind, IDS
- Ian Scoones, IDS