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Kindling the Minds and Hearts of Farmers
Once upon a time, Kouame Dembele from Bamoro area in Côte d’Ivoire was a simple farmer who used to wait helplessly for government officials or NGOs to solve his problems on the farm. Now, Dembele provides training to farmers on demand, thanks to a novel approach to farmer learning
called Participatory Learning and Action Research (PLAR).
Dembele’s training is so valued by other farmers that they are willing to pay him CFA 2000 (about
3€) per session—a relatively significant amount for farmers in the region.
This transformation didn’t happen overnight. It took several PLAR sessions for Dembele to realize that farmers have within them, the essential ability necessary to solve most of their problems. They only have to learn to better observe, analyze, take appropriate decisions, and organize themselves for action.
In a nutshell, that is what PLAR is all about—an effort to promote technological change by improving farmers’ capacity to exchange knowledge, experiences and practices, and thus find solutions for themselves.
The result is not only a tangible increase in agricultural productivity, but also more self-reliant farmers and a more sustainable farming system. Although at an experimental stage, the PLAR approach, which is based on the principle of a bottom-up social learning process, is quietly shattering myths about technology transfer and changing the way farmers think of themselves as well as the way the others think of them.
In the Bamoro and Lokakpli areas in Côte d’Ivoire, for example, the rice yields of those farmers who adopted the integrated crop management (ICM) technology thanks to PLAR, increased by about 0.6 tonnes per hectare in the first year itself.
Farmers from these areas are now forming a rural knowledge center and the trained farmers not only impart technologies, but also key elements of scientific thinking as well as the advantages of community action to neighboring villages through farmer-to-farmer learning.
“PLAR serves as an entry point for disseminating knowledge about complex issues and interactions, such as ICM, for which the conventional top-down technology transfer approach is not suitable,” explains Dr Toon Defoer, WARDA’s Technology Transfer Specialist. It was Dr Defoer who developed the basic idea of this methodology, and can be called the Father of PLAR. However, unwilling to take sole credit for it, Dr Defoer said that everyone who has come in contact with PLAR has a share in its evolution, because it is an approach that has to be adapted to specific conditions.
The approach is being successfully used by WARDA in inland valley rice-based systems on several sites in Côte d’Ivoire in close collaboration with the national extension service, Agence nationale d’appui au développement rural (ANADER).
PLAR has also been initiated in Mali, Togo, and Benin, and will soon be extended to Guinea, Ghana, and the Gambia, and eventually to other countries as part of the rice network, Réseau ouest et centre africain du riz (ROCARIZ), coordinated by WARDA.
PLAR uses a wide range of learning tools, such as cropping calendars, maps, diagrams, and monitoring forms. These tools help make complex concepts easy to grasp. The PLAR learning tools at present form the basis of 28 modules that constitute the curriculum for farmer learning on ICM. The modules are planned to be published as a set of training manuals in English and French.
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