 We thank you for being punctual and Allowing us to stay pretty much on schedule. So an opportunity to now hear from the two rapporteurs on what You said in your particular group so that we get the feedback from each of the two groups So Jill will lead off Dr. Fendais has many years experience in Africa and is now leading agricultural economics, ag education, rural sociology, and agricultural journalism at the University of Missouri. Thank you Ken, and I'm delighted to be here to just summarize some of what we heard today For the groups and we had two great presentations Keith Moore started and then we had Rebecca Nelson And they really got us thinking about a lot of different ideas That made us stretch and so I put together a couple of PowerPoints that were based upon the discussion that happened afterwards And I apologize to anybody right up front whose a specific point I left out So if we have a minute right afterwards for anybody that wants to contribute that point I think it'd be useful, okay This is what I heard and one one in terms of reflecting on it as well as Summarizing what I heard today We have a lot of discussion about the idea of science communication You hear triple a s and other groups talking about Communicating science to the public, but what we have today here is also this two-way Communication going on and it's not only communication. It's also about listening So several of our groups brought up about the listening issue And how we can listen and listen well for these put for what we're talking about in terms of topic Early so listening and translation Early integration of voice came up as one of the important topics and it was reflected from this morning's topic And whose voice and that came up at several tables in terms of power structures and Hearing from others outside of the dominant power structure Questions, okay, so how are we going to broaden that voice? How are we going to get down under dominant power structures that might be the participators in our research and questions came up in presentations and Rebecca's presentations Presentation dealt a little bit with the IT platform How can we utilize the IT platform better than we've done and I put up some topics crowd sourcing knowledge sharing Idea visual is there or data visualization best practice is how what do we know? How can we do that? How can we do it faster? How can we do it in the next in the next couple of years? to really address these kinds of topics We also talked about not only listening to the field but also breaking down barriers among us and And How do we talk his disciplines and how do we listen as disciplines and I think that's a very important topic at this point It did can't come up in our discussions around our tables breaking down barriers between researchers MSU gave us a hint and said Carry big stick, so I bring that big stick, okay to be able to bring that down but I think we're really talking again about listening and Also Translating and in those early stages of that collaboration. There's a lot of translating that goes on But later on it's also that listening that very careful listening that goes on Between people that are trying to solve a problem We also talked across the tables that come came up across a number of the tables about power dynamics and The question of seeing more participation among women came up There was the dominant structure talked about but then women and talking about children that came up in the earlier presentations by Presentation by Regina and how do we go about doing that? I'm still seeing in a lot of pictures that I see mostly men in the pictures and But now we're starting to see more and more inclusion of the voice of women and that came up today as a as a sense of we're making progress a Focus on youth critical and I think most of us agree with that concept. I don't think we've gotten there yet and how do we go about doing that and that came up from one of our tables and It was very much emphasized and I think in our thinking it's emphasized as well then also in terms of power dynamics and this goes to the University and it may not have been intended from the university's perspective But the idea of metrics for measuring impacts. How do we go about measuring impacts? So it's not only at the university level But also as we go farther out into the field and what do we mean by real impact or the impacts of our work as We start listening to each other Then I think there were a number of ideas and these were across the tables To explore and operationalize and these to me are always fun in other words places when you come to a conference or ideas when you come to a conference and you start to hear Different ideas that you go. Oh if we could only do that and one was the provision of choice and the idea of an information market and that came up in the presentation that Rebecca did and How do we do it? How do we do that and that that that question was raised by at least one of the tables as we went around the room Another was just in time research How do we do that if we bring the kinds of ideas that we're talking about up to the front end and Then we have quite a long timeline for some of the science research to take place How are we doing that continually throughout the process and speeding it up, but also making it just in time So we're talking about processes and that was that was I think interesting to all of us Continuous use of indigenous knowledge and in fact I'm surprised that word hadn't come up earlier in the conference because there's such an interest in indigenous knowledge groups across the United States and But it did come up in the group conversations and then appropriate scaling and it was brought up in terms of human capacity building policy etc And there were a number of different bullet points under that particular aspect of it that were important My last slide just a couple of reminders that came out of our discussions after the presentations one was one size doesn't fit all and Obviously if you had there's never a situation where you have only one voice there are multiple voices There's choice that goes into development. That's the way we live today and Also, we need to learn to crawl or walk before we can run in other words We have to be listening on the ground Understand the dynamics of on the ground before we can take it forward now on each of my slides I've included one particular photo that was important to me Okay, and I actually didn't realize that until today This is a picture in Mozambique of orange flesh sweet potato And it was in the field in a place where I had not seen it ever before when I was there in May and I was going to send it to Regina and as I started to put it up there I In these are everywhere everywhere in the villages in in moon Hinga in central Mozambique I Said put it up there the picture as you know came up large and I saw the people You can barely see them on the side I saw those people sitting there and they would have told us a lot. We didn't do that We made a mistake. We went by I took a picture. We moved on it really was a moment We could have utilized and I hope we utilize those moments. Thanks Other before you start any other points that I missed Any points I missed from the group Patty from the world force egg world forestry Center and Angler Forestry Center and Research into action Thanks So we had a great group of people Ruth and Jerry really gave us a lot of food for thought and we had quite a wide ranging conversation So it was a challenge to Summarize it, but I have to say that in trying to think of some organizing principles To give the feedback I'm calling this challenges and opportunities for translational research And I've been leading a research program That involved all 15 of the CGI our centers for the last five years and I've called it linking knowledge with action And it's not knowledge to action because it's a two-way thing And I want to make sure that action is informing the knowledge in both ways and when you do the knowledge to action We're we're falling back into that pipeline route that there's some brilliant people coming up with great ideas And then it's just about translating in and getting out there and In the CG in particular We've been trying to flip it on its edge and really think about how we do research in a fundamentally different way than we have been So that we will have more impact on sustainable poverty alleviation, etc and so that the the topic of this conversation of this Conference is is a big one and and I'm really really happy that this conversation is happening now Across universities and other places where I haven't seen it happening so so much Although there's a new area called sustainability science in many places, which is really trying to do this and Bill Clark a group at Harvard is actually was one of my first exposures to really thinking about this and How we can call it a research area in of itself? Because we don't know how to do this if we knew how to do it would just be about process But we don't know and we it's still a researchable issues So the four things I came up with from the conversations in our group were number one institutions matter They matter a lot and I want to talk about institutions. It's the rules of the game And when the rules of the game don't support Translational research we have a we have a continuing challenge and these are the institutional rules of research organizations of the funding organizations and It's not just the institutions that we work with in the developing world. It's their capacity also If you think we're struggling with it in in the international ag research area, you know How is Akari or or other people? dealing with this so it does matter I Got struck by your sticks and carrots because it's been a debate within my own group Some management types like the stick approach more than the carrot approach But I actually think it's all about the carrots and it's about the incentives Which is the institutions and the rules of the game, right? So you keep coming back to that one of the things that shifted in the CG recently is the shift to open access And I'm not sure if anyone's appreciating how big an incentive shift that is Where you know, we can bring together people from very diverse organizations and say actually what we're developing together is going to be shared with the world and Even if it's just this little thing and you go and write your paper for your university or write a policy brief for your NGO or whatever What we are creating and the data we're collecting and the new knowledge We're generating is we're sharing it with the world and young students all over the place are going to get access to it that never had Access to it before and so I think that's a huge one Translational research takes time And it comes up in very many ways and Creating those spaces for diverse actors to come together and co-create solutions to the local problems These communities of practice that Karen has so eloquently talked about I really like that idea of calling them We've been calling them in the linking knowledge the action field Safe spaces because what you want to do is get people away from their own incentives Bring them together in a space where they have freedom to create They can go back to their you know incentives and rewards But when they're co-creating together you've given them freedom to be creative and do things in a very different way and The M&E frameworks the log frames and all these things that we all have to deal with when we write a proposal or try to fund research Don't create that space. They can hinder it. So again, we're talking about big changes So on a more positive note, we've learned a lot and And and this came out in our group We talk about the the K2A principles and in my world and they are based on the foundations of capacity communication and partnership through thoughtful engagement processes and I call I talk about structured well facilitated Processes are absolutely key because you don't just bring people together and hope to have a good party in the middle You have to really structure it and by structuring it you enable them to be creative Structure actually enables creativity and we've learned a lot about that So this co-development of the metrics of success, which is another topic that kept coming up How do we know that we're succeeding and and by doing this little case study here and this little case study here And even maybe bringing those together We're not creating the the powerful evidence that a lot of people are asking for So we've got in in the climate change Social learning initiative that's just been started by a program called seacuffs that I've been with We've we are crowd sourcing Projects that have been taking Translational research approaches if you will and we're trying to bring together hundreds of them And and crowd sourcing them so we're not cherry picking because we get accused of cherry picking when we do the evaluation in the other way Crowd source a whole bunch of projects what we've created as a framework for evaluating the success of these projects And we're asking people to to apply this same framework You're still gonna have your specifics for your project specific to your whatever the project's about But by trying to create a framework and bring in these hundreds of case studies We're trying to build up the evidence over the next five to ten years And we're trying to use social learning principles and social media and crowd sourcing as the as the Organizing principles, so I think that's the kind of exciting new thing that we've got to start thinking about in the research world Okay Which brings me the last point which I talked to I call sort of the scaling How how is the scaling issue and how do we get leverage? Because we can always have these wonderful projects where you've been working with communities in a particular place for five or ten years And we're telling that story quite eloquently, but of course that's not what we're being asked to do We're being asked to how do you do that much more broadly and widely and and reach so many more people? Well, I think the ICT Approach is something to really think about and by thinking about communication and including communication Specialists from the beginning not later, which we often do as scientists Thinking about this social learning in a really much more structured way than we have How do we use cell phones radios TV social media? To think about right from the beginning in any kind of project or program we go forward with with To to do that inclusive empowering stuff that we want to do stuff So I really want to thank you guys because this has helped me start to to think about This has been a paper in my head for five years. Do you guys have that paper? You never get to writing? And this is helping me to come up with and so if you guys have any other suggestions for me on the Organizing principles of this paper because what we're doing here is just it's really is the cutting edge Someone said to me that once you know patty. This isn't rocket science and they said it's it's the new science and I thought that was pretty cool. So thank you We do have time for one or two clarifying questions if you have them for Jill or Patty Great summary Yes, Bill we talk about extension from and we talk about outreach to But I think your point was its engagement with Changing the preposition can make a big difference another comment or question Yes, Jeff She's coming on the general topic of scaling. I wonder if there's been any thought in terms of putting ourselves out of business in terms of Or altering our role and looking ahead 10 or 20 years. Do we really want to have outside experts guiding the research in you know in the in the countries that we're working in now shouldn't we be Looking at developing institutions and systems that begin to take on these roles and in a sense put ourselves out of business now There still might be a role for example in the CG in terms of germplasm maintenance and addressing regional problems that go Across national borders and so on but it seems to me, you know when we're talking about scaling ultimately a lot of these Efforts have to be done by the nations themselves. And so can we help enable that process and in essence put ourselves out of business in 10 or 20 years? Response I couldn't agree more. I Always actually when I entered the CG over 20 years ago I said that the sign of my success will be that I'm just absolutely not needed Anymore I what is this white blonde woman from Canada coming in you know living in Africa and Just doesn't make sense at some levels does it so I think what what what you're talking about is actually a challenge for everyone in the room In the in the academic community, so how do we do the training and capacity? Programs in a different way also And I think a lot of you were struggling with that and I'm sure looking at the MOOCs and other ways because I just think But you know you don't just put it on the web and it's you know, it's it's learned and taken up It's not that easy So it's a little bit about the open access, but it's a lot about targeting the needs their specific needs And and really thinking again, and it's a communication challenge It's a big one So I think I think we all should be challenged in this room to be thinking about that and absolutely We should be obsolete in another 10 or 20 years. Let's hope Obviously well put I can't agree more It would be fabulous that to me is what capacity building is about it's enabling and if we can be out of business fabulous We don't have time for more questions, but The discussion can continue and thank the two of you for really summarizing very well now moving into our Further into our afternoon schedule Dr. Ambassador Siddiqui is here to be the moderator for this short Session before we go back into some discussions, but we're certainly happy to have you here Islam Thank You Ken Thank you for this exciting and fascinating discussion so far I know we have not allowed questions, but I think the good thing about this session is since we have only one speaker You'll have an opportunity to ask more questions and continue the discussion we had of course this morning Joanna Nestle and as well as doctors Dayton Valdivia and Ellers As well as dr. Cupping up were Instrumental and getting the discussion going and I think I would like to continue as we shift gears Into the discussion, which is how funders researchers NGOs and small holders create mutual opportunities and sustainable outcomes Building partnerships is not new to CSIS every day We at this CIS continue to build partnerships and the importance of collaboration across sectors Institutions and areas of expertise are a common day occurrence and this keeps on happening and that's what we pride as core strength of CSIS During my tenure in the Obama administration and before that in the Clinton administration I have continued to benefit in my role as by in engaging in negotiations Bilaterally regionally and multilaterally on agriculture trade issues I think dr. Moore brought the point which I was going to make and I want to reinforce in order to reach Sustainable outcomes and agreements you have to engage in negotiations You then also face resistance from the stakeholders and the and the partners in my case trading partners And then how do you build the chemistry to reach? Agreements and this is what I found in my work over the past 18 plus years in Washington, DC How do you reach mutual and sustainable? Agreements in terms of reaching outcomes, which will be sustainable for in the long run So sustainable solutions to for food insecurity across the public and private sectors as well as non-government institutions and organizations and small-holder farmers and entrepreneurs can be leveraged to harness Inclusive opportunities and sustainable outcomes across the world and both in Nations which are developing as well as developed Joining us today is dr. Sahara moon chapatin the acting division chief for agriculture research at the US agency for international development She joined the agency in 2006 as biotechnology advisor managing international partnerships to promote the adoption of generically modified Products as well as conservation agriculture practices in South Asia as well as develop by engineered crops for small-holder farmers and strengthen biosafety regulatory capacities throughout Africa in Asia Prior to joining USAID dr. Chapatin work with the biosafety Institute for genetically modified agriculture products or big map for short at the Iowa State University Where her work focused on? Resolving regulatory issues for genetically modified crops, especially those intended for small and niche markets Dr. Chapatin holds a BS degree in biology from Stanford University and PhD degree in physiology From the Harvard University and she's also a triple AS Science and technology policy fellow So she will be speaking this afternoon on achieving meaningful smallholder Participation for meaningful knowledge. So please join me in welcoming dr. Chapatin to the podium Thanks a lot. It's great to be here This is I'm sorry to have missed the morning session. So I was pleased to get the the two little recaps that we just got How do I how do I work the slides? great cool, okay. Well, thanks a lot for that and So I'm from the US agency for international development I'm gonna be actually it sounds like a lot of the what I'll be talking about are some themes you might have already touched on this morning So particularly The point on how we engage women when we're thinking about smallholders how we engage women in particular in the agricultural enterprise is something I'll be talking about But I'm generally gonna be talking about how we work with smallholder farmers how we work for smallholder farmers through a range of different models Through our work at USAID on agriculture and food security My my primary responsibility at USAID is in the research division But I'll be trying to pull in some examples from across the agency as well But I will I think it research is of interest to this audience I'll be drawing on on examples from research quite a bit one of these buttons will do it, right? So I probably don't need to restate the global challenge. I imagine all of you are familiar with this but we are trying to address the fact that You know many people across the world around over 800 million people still suffer from chronic hunger The world's population of course is still growing food food product production will need to increase Throughout all this we're facing the uncertainty of climate change and the fact that resources are Being to our scarce whether it's land water labor. You name it. We're basically having to do more with less The global food price spike of 2008 was really the the genesis of the US government's current response to global To addressing global hunger and food security and what came out of this was the feed the future initiative That's a whole of government initiative It pulls in not just USAID who leads the initiative but of course other agencies throughout the US government in particular the US Department of Agriculture and And basically this is renewing the US government's commitment to reducing hunger and poverty around the world And we're really working with partner countries to help them to combat hunger and under nutrition and As I mentioned, it's a it's a whole of government it was it's initiated as a presidential initiative and And it really has at its root a focus on it on it being a long-term effort Not just to get in and out really quick But to really do the long-term work that's required to sustainably transform Agricultural systems and to feed people So I'm going to be talking a little bit about how we focus on small holders and how we focus on women through this initiative Both of these are really at the heart of the initiative And I'm going to pull on different examples from our programs about how we get impact in the field through the impact pathways many of which start with Research but go all throughout the value chain into the field So why do we why do we work with small holders? Really the evidence suggests that the evidence demonstrates that investments in smallholder agriculture can have a huge impact on overall poverty reduction And that those impact those investments in agriculture and the impacts you can get from that It can be quite a bit greater than than in many other sectors in development 75% of the poor the world's poor live in rural areas. So right there you can see why you need to you need to ground your efforts in agricultural and rural areas When you invest in smallholder ag lead development, you're creating rural income growth and employment linkages and And there's evidence that small farms can be even more productive than large farms So really by investing in small holders and their small farms, which can have very efficient use of resources You can really both increase food production But also get those increases in smallholder incomes that are going to lead to the broader rural income growth that we're looking for So this this initiative is not just about I mean, it's at its heart It's a food security initiative But it's about both feeding people and really using the agricultural enterprise to transform economies and developing countries and And in fact just a little data point here smallholder agriculture has been shown to be 3.2 times more effective at reducing extreme poverty than investments in other sectors And then why do we invest in women? I probably don't need to explain that to this crowd It's recognized I think throughout development that that women are particularly important But in agriculture that's that's especially so and gender analysis underlies everything we do within feed the future We recognize that women are a large part of the labor force up to 50% in many parts of Africa They often will have limited land access to land to technologies to inputs Credit and this makes it difficult for them to be productive on their farms And when you can advance the status of women you can increase agricultural productivity overall because you're giving women more access to these things Poverty can be reduced and you can increase nutrition And it's been estimated that if women had the same access to assets as men you could you could increase Farm yields by 20 to 30 percent and that's that's pretty major if you think that Perhaps half of the smallholders are women and then you're increasing that by 20 to 30 percent You could make some some major gains So not just in our field work Do we think about how we can engage women not just when we're out there directly working with smallholders But in everything we do and and from the research side of things that represents a challenge We have to think about if we're funding and we're supporting say a project That's fairly upstream thinking about genomics for a crop How do you think about women and the impacts that's gonna have on women and the relevance of your research to women? When you're working with a bunch of scientists back in a lab somewhere who're doing sequencing That's something we're still working on and we're trying to think through and I'll show you I'll show you some examples about how we do bring that gender analysis into the work We do and and I won't say that we've got it all figured out certainly across feed the future. This is this is sort of a learning and progress We're really trying to understand how we can better engage with and work with and for women in everything we do So I mentioned research. I'm gonna switch just for a moment and say you a little bit about our research strategies I think that will be of interest it it was launched in 2011 the feed the future research strategy and it came out of a year-long consultation process with with many of you I know with the u.s. University community the international research community the NGOs the private sector other stakeholders and and Basically it addresses Global priorities the feed the future initiative is anchored in focused countries 19 focused countries around the world But within the research strategy We've taken a global look to try to see what are the global Challenges that are facing agriculture and how can we bring central? Resources to bear on those challenges what kind of research should be prioritized in order to really advance agriculture around the world and Through our research strategy. We're ensuring a pipeline of innovation of knowledge of technologies of capacity building that really can underlie the entire initiative So to get there we started with a series of analyses We did we started with overlaying some spatial analyses thinking about how the prevalence of poverty Lines up with the number where where the poor people are in the world We overlaid that with analysis of where you have the most stunted children in the world and here I'll just say that Feed the future is not just an agricultural growth program But as I said it's it's a the food security component is extraordinarily important and a very important component of food security is nutrition Security that's that's part of food security And so we would not be effective if we were not taking into account Ensuring nutritional outcomes for the small holders and the populations we're working with so it's this it's this overlay of poverty and under nutrition With where in the world you have the productive agricultural systems that you really could transform Through the right kinds of investments And that's where we came out with with our feed the future research strategy Essentially it was anchored in these key geographies where there are many many small holders There's a high prevalence of poverty of under nutrition of stunting and where there's really the potential to have incredible agricultural growth So the Indiogangetic Plains in South Asia is a major focus for us and three systems in Africa the Sudano-Sahilian Systems in West Africa the May's mixed systems in East and Southern Africa and the Ethiopian Highlands and then on top of that the Prioritization process for our research came out as we have some longer-term research priorities really thinking about advancing the productivity Frontier in both crops and animals looking at at climate resilience and looking at diseases and pests We want to really think about how we can transform these agricultural systems And that requires a research agenda of its own thinking not just how you bring in inputs into a system But how you can transform how that system works and then finally we wanted to really focus on improving nutrition and food safety So now I'm going to shift to going into some examples about how we work with small holders I'm going to pull both from our research programs, but also through some recently launched Scaling activities that are just getting off the ground where we're really bringing the outputs of the research and trying to think About how we can scale those to many many more farmers Then then previously we might have reached But before I do that I just want to kind of highlight the feed the future innovation labs Many of you might have known them by the former name of the crisps of the collaborative research support programs These are now one of the key Partnerships that we have within the feed the future research strategy. They're 24 of these innovation labs Across the country as you can see they engage over 60 u.s. Colleges and universities They are the heart of our research investments and our capacity building investments and each of these works on Both of those as they're doing the research there. They're training students They're working with the institutions in the developing countries and they have real meaningful Partnerships with those developing country partners and they really have a long-standing focus on smallholder farmers If you look throughout the programs of the innovation labs and the former crisps You'll see that that really working with small holders both men and women has been at the heart of what they do So the first example I'm going to tell you about is is Africa rising? It's really our signature sustainable intensification research program Anchored in Africa in those three production systems. I mentioned it's Complimented by a similar program in South Asia that I won't talk about today And in fact we've just added to this portfolio of sustainable intensification a new innovation lab focused on sustainable intensification That was just awarded to Kansas State University So as a side note that program is actually we're putting out its competitive RFAs soon So if you're interested to engage with us in research in this area Look out for announcements from Kansas State on how you might become involved in the research that they're going to be leading Which will really complement the research that I'm going to talk about here under Africa rising So it Africa rising is a huge project. I could I could spend all afternoon telling you about it But I'm just going to highlight a few things in here One is that they work through these innovation platforms and what those essentially are our local stakeholders Brought into groups to really help identify the key research needs So the research that the program is doing on farming systems on sustainable intensification is informed by these innovation platforms This helps ensure that the research is really addressing local priorities But also that the feedback about the technologies in the research is going from those beneficiaries from the smallholder farmers back to the researcher so it's a two-way street and Then these innovation platforms can also be used to help strengthen the market linkages to make sure that the Production side of things is effectively linked to the the markets the aggregators the processors bringing in the extension agents and so forth So it's a real Dynamic platform at the field level to engage the smallholders with all the other actors in the in the value chain What we have a photo here is of the mother-baby trials This is another way that the the program engages smallholders is by bringing in Smallholders into the research process itself many of the research activities are taking place on the farmers fields So it's a very rich relationship there This is one of these guys If I can get to the end without going too far There we go. So this is this is sort of a complex cartoon that that is sort of illustrate the different kinds of interventions and research That can happen at the field level Africa rising really It takes as its unit of research not an individual farmers field But actually the entire farm the entire household enterprise and this helps you get at things There's trade-offs between you might grow maize in your field or you might use an area for livestock or you might want to Use your your leftovers to over as fodder or you might want to integrate it into your into your field So there's all these different trade-offs that you can really only get a good sense of if you're working at the entire farm level But what I wanted to show here was this little basket You I don't know if you can read this on the right, but this this research is essentially about Creating options and and giving smallholder farmers options to choose from so it's not coming in and saying here Are the package of technologies that you need to use in order to be effective? It's saying these are technologies that we have tested that we have tried in collaboration with the smallholder farmers And we know they work and let's work with you to help figure out what might be best in your farm because it's gonna be different If you're a single parent a single mother perhaps With a small piece of land you're gonna be trying out a different range of options than a large family operation with much more labor On the farm for example So this is just an example of a farmer that Africa rising works with Elizabeth Mindy a smallholder in Tanzania. She has five children working on a relatively small farm Through working with the project She was able to pilot test a number of new technologies ranging from new varieties different fertilizer or manure approaches and different intercropping and spacing opportunities and so she actually tried the maze and the pigeon pea intercropping trials on Her farm and then surrounding farmers were able to come and meet with her and see what she's doing on her farm Learn what her experience is which was actually quite positive She did a trial essentially on her farm where she left a small part of her farm in her conventional practice and On the larger part of her farm she tried out these various new technologies and was really encouraged by the yield Increases that that she got so but but by working with a farmer like like Elizabeth who's quite engaged with her community That that learning can be transferred and shared with other small holders in her in her region So I mentioned earlier that we're challenged in thinking about how you involve communities and smallholders and women Even in what might appear to be a more upstream science genomics project that they might be hard to make that connection Through a collaboration with the US Department of Agriculture the International Livestock Research Institute in Kenya We're working on a goat genomics project This is about trying to select better genetics to deal with climate change and to be more productive in in smallholder systems in Africa And so there's quite a bit of work going on in the lab on putting together a high-quality goat genome assembly Trying to identify genetic variation and signatures of selection But at the same time the project is now taking this learning and Developing it into community-based breeding programs And this is working directly with the farmers in a community to give them the tools and the knowledge that they need in order to Do selection at their herd level? If you think about a herd of goats You might be incentivized as a farmer to take the ones that grow most quickly and to sell those off when they're young to Increase your income, but that might have a sort of perverse selection On your herd and you would essentially be be weeding out the most productive goats if you did that so this is about Sort of bringing a different approach and you're giving smallholders farmers the tools that they might themselves need in order To to advance their herd selection at the herd level at the community level So that's that's kind of a neat example of how you can bring that genomics learning all the way down To make it useful in the field at the farmer level Here's another one of so this is one of our innovation labs the soybean value chain research innovation lab and They work in Africa Thinking about what there's one of their studies here is on whether and how small older farmers can really engage in the soybean value Chain, I think we think of soy value chains in many places as quite commercial Perhaps not where you'd expect a smallholder farmer to be engaging, but there's evidence in Africa that there's some real opportunities there So the socioeconomics Portion of the study is really focused on a few questions trying to understand is soy being appropriate for smallholder farmers If not, why and if yes, how can you best introduce it? And what are the gender implications in terms of the decision-making and who are the beneficiaries in a family? Another I'll get to this last point on the women's empowerment and agriculture index But this is a tool that I'll describe later that we're actually using within this project So here you have a photo of The the researchers engaging with the smallholder farmers during the socioeconomic work and then you have seed packets here ready for dissemination This is one part of a much larger project looking across the soy value chain another part of this project is looking at at soy milk production something they're calling Vita goat and and trying to think about how smallholder farmers can engage in soy milk production how they can get linked to a broader market through this What's the economic sustainability of the of the soy milk enterprise and how can they train and engage? Community-based advisors to really help the women and the smallholders who are producing soy milk to make it into a profitable enterprise So it's not just a household level enterprise, but it's actually something with with real potential So you'll notice here. I'm going through some legume examples. There's no It's not really a coincidence I think we've we have a really strong focus on legumes across our feed the future research programs We're recognizing that legumes are often a very important income source for women in particular They often tend to grow the legumes and legumes of course are also quite nutritious And so this helps us get at both our income and our nutrition Generating goals and finally of course legumes are an important important part of sustainable agricultural systems So as we saw with the with the farmer in Tanzania if she's integrating legumes into her maize system She has the potential to really make it quite a bit more sustainable and productive So this is an example from our legume innovation lab, which is run by Michigan State University This particular project is is run by the University of Illinois and researchers in Niger And it's focused on integrated pest management in Calpe And it's this partnership between the university researchers the the local partners in in Niger and NGOs who are working at the household level in Niger and they've come up with a number of different strategies to address pests of Calpe and it involves a nemoil mixture and Then a particular virus that that combat the pests but what's really important here is they've been able to work with youth in particular and training youth how to use and how to produce these these products and And of those youth they've had 50% girls in a country like Niger, which is impressive And they're working in multiple villages throughout Niger through these local NGOs So again an example of really taking an approach and a technology trying it out at the field level with smallholder farmers and giving Them the opportunity to test it in their fields and even to be engaged in the production and the sale of the technology Another legume example This is from from Latin America another program run by the legume innovation lab out of Michigan State and It's built on this is sort of I think a nice example to show how the impact pathway goes from research all the way to impacts in the field This is building on many years of research to develop new bean varieties. They're drought tolerant pest resistant really suited to the agroecologies and in Latin America Bean is a is a heavy seed. It's it's not easy to transport it's self-pollinated It's very common for farmers to save their own seed There's not a lot of private sector investment in this market And the markets themselves are fragmented and poor and so in addition to the research effort around developing new bean varieties There was a research effort around actually trying to test out the different models of seed production Should you do it through community-based production? Is there a way to do it through government system? whoever it is they tried a number of different approaches and They came up with using these community seed banks and the community level seed production as a really viable option for these Ecologies for this type of seed and by the end of the project They had reached over a hundred thousand small orders across several countries in Latin America And at the same time they were producing and disseminating through these community Strategies the packages of the rhizobia inoculant to go with the seed So what's really been nice to see come out of this is that our Guatemala mission has now made another investment To really ramp up this effort I'm going to do there is to integrate not just the seed dissemination through the community seed production But really to integrate that with nutrition messaging around how you might improve the quality of your diet at the household level So this kind of gets to something else that we're really focused on within feed the future in particular our research strategy is How can you get those nutrition outcomes at the household level through agriculture investments? It's not simply enough to help people produce more beans Maybe they sell them instead of eating them or maybe they don't have the full range of nutrition information They need a level so we actually have a fair amount of operational research that is focused on specifically that question of how can you Align and how can you design your agriculture investments to get those specific nutrition outcomes that are really one of the top-line goals of feed the future? So now I'm going to shift away from the research into a series of new projects that were just launched many of them with CGI our partners around scaling technologies and these are technologies that are ready to go that have been developed already Perhaps aren't reaching enough farmers for a variety of reasons or we often say they're sort of just sitting on a shelf sometimes And so this influx of resources and attention is aimed at really trying to think about the best ways To get these technologies out the door and Julie Howard's here She was during her time at USA it really involved in in mobilizing folks in our office behind this and getting this entire initiative off the ground This is an example in Ethiopia mark Malt Barley production a lot of these samples I'm going to walk you through our seed based, but in fact the seeds dissemination is happening at the same time with information on Admin practices best practices how you can link to market So it's not just a seed effort as it is really thinking about how you empower smallholders to to adopt a full range of Technologies and to themselves figure out what they want to use To ensure that that that the research outputs are not just sitting on a shelf for in a lab somewhere, but really getting out to scale so that's just an example of of Working with with farmers to grow a new kind of barley that's particularly suitable for Also in Ethiopia another example of community based seed production I think legumes lend themselves really well to community based seed production Primarily because there's so little in many places so little private sector investment that that you can't just say well The private sector will handle seed multiplication dissemination because that's not happening for a lot of these really critical crops that are important to smallholder farmers Faba bean is another one. We're working through Crops to date. I think 10% of the national seed supply in Ethiopia actually is is through community based seed production Another one vegetable seed kits with the World Vegetable Center This is recognizing that vegetables play an important role in in nutritional and dietary diversity and Often are an important source of income for farmers as well So this is an effort to try to increase that year-round access to to nutritious foods Different kinds of vegetables and to give them the Access to the entire packet of tools they might need which could include include seed but but many other things as well And then finally one more legume example in West Africa Scaling both groundnut and cowpea again two crops that are extraordinarily important to smallholder farmers a number of new varieties are coming out of the Pipeline in groundnut. That's varieties with aflatoxin resistance shorter duration Drought tolerance in cowpea. It's striker resistance higher grain fodder yield Resistance to nematodes or aphids so it's it's really again This is an effort working with community based seed production to try to get these varieties To farmers and to help them be engaged and really disseminating and even profiting from the dissemination of these varieties along with The associated tools and and and best best practices that you would need So now I'm going to shift again. I mentioned I would come back to gender When we started Feed the Future it was clear that we really wanted to be working on gender It was extraordinarily important for us to wreck you know We recognize that we were only going to succeed in as much as we could Reach smallholder farmers we could change their access their decision-making powers on the household within the household But we didn't really have a good way of measuring that. How do you know if you're having an impact? All our projects count the number of beneficiaries that are men and women and that's great And it's great that we require you to do so if you're one of our grantees But that doesn't necessarily tell us are we really changing the status for women? Are we changing dynamics? Are we giving them a level playing field within the agricultural system so along with with several other partners? We led the development of something called the women's empowerment and agriculture index and this tool tracks Women's roles and engagement in agriculture essentially relative to men and it's it's a very quantitative tool That you can use to to gauge your progress at right now It's it's being used at the national level or across large areas and it looks over who make it looks at who makes the decisions Who has access to assets and resources who controls the use of the income? What are the leadership roles within the community and how do women and men spend their time and this is a survey-based tool? That we found quite effective, but it's actually now being diversified and we're using it in different ways We're Streamlining a new version of it that can be used in large national surveys But we're also coming up with versions that can be used at the project level and I mentioned that the soya bean valued Chain innovation lab is actually working with that tool at the project level and and we're trying to take the the learning that's come out of Wea and gender analysis and really thinking about it from the project design stage Thinking about it as you're building your impact pathways for a new commodity or new project that you're working with How can you ensure that it's gender sensitive and that you're going to get those gender income or sorry gender outcomes? This is just an example the sorghum mill at innovation lab using gender analysis In the in the development of their value chain work. So as the project got off the ground They got a bunch of folks together. It's a nice schematic But it's really thinking about what are the roles of men and women in their value chain and they're doing this before They've even initiated really any research. It's not after the fact how we're going to get this out to women But it's as we get started. How do we really build this in from the get-go and Then just a last slide to show how we use gender assessment in the program cycle Really through design through implementation through the monitoring and evaluation phase and then the assessment and the redesign and at every step In this process thinking about what are the impacts? How can we how can we really ensure that we're getting those impacts that that we that we're trying for for both small-holder farmers and for women And that's all I got. Thanks a lot So it's time for question and comments. So please Anyone before you start? Let me just ask the first question using my prerogative here Sarap I see all the work which is being done and you gave a very good Menu of what's being done under feed the future and other programs my question to you is when you talk to People in sub-Saharan African countries. Do you see any lessening of their concern or quote-unquote opposition to GMOs or is that still there? I didn't even mention GMOs. How come I'm getting a question on them? You hear both I mean there are farmers who wish they could be growing The existing gently engineer crops and they're not able to because their government hasn't yet advanced them through a regulatory system Or there's no one to make them available in a country. You could imagine Something like like a drought tolerant maze or an insect resistant maze or a BT cotton And then you also you hear from farmers that have heard that these crops are gonna be toxic and and have all sorts of problems And they're usually hearing them from sources that are not particularly credible But I think when it really comes down to it the farmers are looking for tools to increase their productivity and profitability and You know, they'd be likely to adopt them if they could Thanks. I was very interested in your technology scaling and your examples of the community based seed production how do you Sort of Work with the the private sector to the extent that there is some private sector I mean particularly vegetable seeds and things like that. I suspect and and how do you? Sort of build in sort of the Evolution of the seed industry I mean in the sense you'd hope that that that some of the community-based stuff would eventually lead to to some women's groups or whatever Building on the current role that they play in in multiplying and selling seeds to to maybe develop their own companies or any how to to figure out a way to work with the The private seed industry as it evolves. Yeah, that's absolutely. That's a great question I think there's a real spectrum There's gonna be some crops in some places where there simply isn't yet a seed industry of any sort and that's where you're working through Communities, there's gonna be other places where perhaps it's a mix different kinds of farmers are either gonna reach out to their Neighbors or to the private sector some crops lend themselves really well like maize for example to really helping to strengthen the local private sector And and doing it that way I think an example of what you described is in Nepal where there's been an effort around community seed production for many years And we're seeing some of those small community groups turn into private enterprises So that's an evolution that I think is can certainly play out in some areas and in some crops that lend themselves better to that You we'd like to see more of it. So certainly something we're working with I'm talking about community seed production in these projects, but there's a range of different investments we make into that seed sector Our work with with Agra in Africa for example is working with with small private seed companies Thank you very much Edma by My question is in the old model Extension services served as a go between between research and farmers where information was flowing one way In this new model where we bring researchers closer to the farmers and we're saying that there's a two-way street of Information flow what do you envision as a role of extension if any at all? And are you funding any extension support work anymore? Is that an old model? Thank you Well, I don't see why the interaction has to be directly always between the researchers and the farmers I think the extension agents themselves can can play a role in there certainly In a lot of places there are more extension agents to go around than there are farmers or sorry than than researchers Certainly not than farmers that would be So I think I think an extension service model that is really Receptive to and working with farmers as opposed to just conveying information to farmers would play an important role in Conveying that information back and forth. I think where we've seen Some really good examples of that and I didn't really talk about South Asia too much But I mentioned we have a program the serial systems initiative for South Asia and it's a bit like Africa rising But it's sort of further along and it's working a lot on models of technology transfer and community-based sort of innovation Platforms and I think one of the things that project has done is Really strengthen and build a new role for those extension systems in the region such that the extension System representatives are actually out there doing joint trials with farmers and themselves being engaged in the research process Once again, thank you for an excellent overview of feed the future And I was particularly pleased to see your emphasis on women in agriculture on the partnership in the innovation labs with the Universities particularly the land-growing universities and your emphasis on nutrition the consumption side of our work but earlier today Jeff Ellers shared some data on consumption or on price prices and projected prices and Over a period of what 15 years to 2025 which showed declining commodity prices and your data or your first slide Suggested an increase in commodity prices and that seems to cut to the heart of Sustainability for our producers are particularly the small holders I wonder if you could comment on the discrepancies between your data Jeff and your your slide on Commodity prices, maybe Jeff might want to comment since I didn't get to see his slide I'm guessing yours was a projection and mine was to date or my I think mine even stopped maybe a year or so ago So I'm not an economist. I probably will just not try to really take a stab at that question, but I think Commodity prices have risen today over where they were where they're going in the future is something we we look to our economists to give Us better information on Thank you. Thank you, sir I just showed a slide from a World Bank report that was looking out to 2025 and it had probably 30 different Basic agricultural commodities and we're showing for most of them slight declines in prices so that by 2025 You know soybeans had fallen from $550 a ton to $510 a ton and so we were trying to You know match that picture with this big food production issue that was on your first slide And and I basically offered it up as a question that I didn't understand the the apparent Lack of linkage between those two numbers, you know, we're facing this huge need to fill You know a lot of hungry mouths, but at the same time there must be the World Bank is figuring there's productive capacity Actually greater than today and that's why food prices are going to be lower They're projecting at least and now you know how accurate I mean I can't say the World Bank's always had a perfect record So, you know, who knows if that's ever gonna come out, but I mean the World Bank has got confidence that everything that we all are doing is gonna be so successful their prices are gonna come back down There you go. They've got a lot of that's a good way to look at it. Thank you. I'll turn it over I feel I have to say something about this. I just went to the if pre Foresight conference last Friday and they have real prices rising in the future So I think, you know, there are lots of different analyses out there For us, we know that if technology grows faster prices won't go up as much. So it's good to keep investing That's the I think the important message that we need I think, you know, smallholders are both consumers and and producers and so This dynamic is always played out in this debate if you're trying to primarily sell things You want prices to be high But if you're also purchasing things which many smallholders are then you want them low, so The big issue for smallholders Yeah So hard in your after rising technology packages, you know You said they're you were gonna have an offer or they're having they have an offering for maybe different levels of farmers or or different individual Situations, is there any financial packages that go with those and because what I worry about is that you know Someone who wants to increase their production simply lacks the you know The little bit of pre-finant production financing to get into that next level of technology package So then they opt for maybe one that's not quite as good but is cheaper and it doesn't really allow them to take that next Step up the economic ladder. Yeah. No, that's a good question And it's certainly something that is part of the mix when you're thinking about transforming and Sustainable intensification. It's it's not just about the biophysical inputs. It's about the financial packages as well I can't say up the top of my head which of the after-rising projects have really integrated that fully or to what extent they're thinking about it It's certainly something that's come up in our South Asia programs as well and and through the different partners in the region Working with with other development partners that may be offering finance Packages or resources that's certainly something that they're trying to integrate Well again, you should have plenty of questions for the discussion sessions We're doing something a little bit different now at 2 o'clock We're going to have those who are funders like gates and USAID and other foundations and If you're an innovation lab person like Michigan State or Virginia Tech or Kansas State Stay in this room and Be a part of the funders discussion If you are a researcher or an outreacher or Some NGO working on the ground with small holders We would like for you to go not next door this time but down to the first level in room 110 for presentations related to working with small holder farmers and so We're gonna Have a chance to get a refreshment There's probably some cookies and some sodas and coffee out there get it on your way down And we will continue in the matter of minutes So that we can continue to get your input Into this dialogue