 We're here at the International Forum for Water and Food in South Africa and we're playing the Happy Strategies game. We have a group here, Justice from Zimbabwe, MK from Zimbabwe. My name is Alan Duncan, I'm working in Ethiopia and we have Jens who's based in... I'm based in Nairobi and looking in and out. You're working in and out? Okay. Good. The strategy game is about putting together different rainwater management practices within the landscape to develop an overall strategy to improve livelihoods and to prevent environmental degradation. So we had a discussion trying to identify some of the issues around rainwater management in this hypothetical landscape and we came up with things like erosion as a problem, soil fertility as a problem, low yields, low access to markets, problems with storage of water for the dry season, deforestation as an issue and so on. And then we had a series of these cards which are practices, for example this one is woodlots and we tried to split the landscape into three zones, the highland zone, the midland zone and the lowland zone. So what we came up with was in the highland zone, there was a suggestion that it might be possible to introduce fruit production in the highland zone based on orchards and maybe some timber production as well but that would require quite a lot of technical input and also some fairly specialised inputs. In the midland zone obviously erosion is a big problem and soil fertility is a problem so combinations of bonds to prevent soil, to prevent runoff and soil erosion but combined with measures to improve soil fertility. And then the lowland zone which is prone to flooding, there was a suggestion that we need to establish some microdams and potentially some ponds. And then, so that's all very well, these are the kind of practices we identified but then how do we actually go about bringing these in? And it was clear that there was quite a lot of system failures so one key issue is that a lot of these interventions require collective action and that's not really happening at the moment in the landscape so the real need for in terms of intervention is some kind of farmer organisation or development of cooperatives. Those would help to link farmers to markets, they would help to provide clusters of farmers for training, they might help to introduce participatory approaches. The key for developing these farmer organisations is the incentives for farmers to get together and we thought about various incentives for building these farmer groups including economic incentives where input supply was based on group formation, perhaps introducing some self-help group models or credit and savings models because a lot of these interventions are quite capital intensive and for all this to happen there would need to be some serious NGO involvement with experience in building farmer groups and that was the strategy that we came up with. The game, I was just saying, we did this game in Bahadar a couple of months ago. This landscape was based on an Ethiopian landscape and we had the only person in the group who had experience in Ethiopia was myself and we found it quite difficult really to work out what needed to happen in this landscape partly because we all come from very different landscapes so it was less easy than when we ran the game in Bahadar I think. Some useful discussion and we learned a lot through the process. It was very useful because this kind of thing almost all the strategies that I needed in any person was the problems that are in this particular hypothetical situation seen to apply almost all the business, including the business that we actually come out of. All the approaches we need to invoke the concerned stakeholder that is the farmer and some of them have been involved from the whole side of the project. As I don't honor it and create sustainability was that if the ownership is built then the program is sustainable. I want to learn a lot about the strategies, not the strategies but the intervention measures we were discussing. Different opinions whether they work or not from the different basins and that was quite interesting. This tillage thing was interesting and the staffs. Sabine said something that worked very well in the Walta which was didn't apply at all in the Ethiopian highlands. I know it was the help desk. Participation of the community that she thought as given and that was our main problem. So there's a lot of things we take for granted coming from a particular basin whereas people coming from another basin might have a very different perspective. So that was quite an interesting outcome.