The Agroecological Adaptation Laboratories
Nicaragua, Colombia, Ecuador
The Agroecological Adaptation Laboratories (AeD-LABs) project intends to support digitally peer to peer knowledge exchange on climate change adaptation and strengthen farmers’ adaptive capacities through agroecological innovation in the face of climate change.
Lead Organization
The project is led by SWISSAID Colombia, SWISSAID Ecuador and SWISSAID Nicaragua, together with their respective local partners. SWISSAID is an NGO headquartered in Switzerland that has been promoting a food system transition and fighting hunger through agroecology in nine partner countries (India, Myanmar, Tanzania, Chad, Niger, Guinea-Bissau, Colombia, Nicaragua and Ecuador). SWISSAID is part of the Alliance for Sustainable Food Systems and Empowered Communities (Sufosec), reaching 43 countries overall.
The project has several local partners, including RENAF-Red Nacional de Agricultura campesina, familiar y comunitaria and Semillas de Identidad in Colombia, the Unión Nacional de Agricultores y Ganaderos (UNAG) and the Organización para el Desarrollo Económico y Social para el Área Urbana y Rural (ODESAR) in Nicaragua, or the Redes de Mujeres in Ecuador. Our main international partners are farmbetter – a private sector, ICT solutions actor – and the World Overview of Conservation Approaches and Technologies (WOCAT).
Country
Nicaragua, Colombia and Ecuador.
Timeline
September 2022-2026
Funding
USD 500 000 funded by several family foundations such as the Swiss-based Stiftung Volkart and the Stiftung Dreiklang.
Mission
The AeD-LABs project strengthens farmers’ adaptive capacities through support to agroecological farmer-led innovation processes in the face of climate change. To do so, facilitators and communities carefully collected local agroecological innovations among small family farmers and small food system actors to then share them to strengthen these actors’ resilience against climate change. The innovations are now featured in an easily accessible virtual space, functioning via application and WhatsApp chatbot. At the same time, innovation processes and farmer-led research are encouraged and supported in the communities beyond the digital space. Successful scaling of the innovations builds on the participation of more and more smallholder farmers and their organizations as well as extension services. Careful data analysis aliments the broader dialogue about how to reduce political or financial barriers to the implementation of agroecological solutions to climate change adaptation.
Context
These countries share similar landscapes and face analogous difficulties due to climate change in these ecosystems: Ecuador and Colombia share the Páramo mountain range (moorland) and several forest ecosystems (rainforest) while the dry corridor in Nicaragua shares aspects of its ecosystem with the tropical dry forest in Colombia etc. The challenges faced in these critical ecosystems are drought, heat, strong winds, heavy unforeseeable rains, but also frost in high altitudes for example. These events affect the local agriculture and food systems and community livelihoods. Some of the mentioned ecosystems are biodiversity hotspots, providing additional critical ecosystem services such as regulating the hydrological cycle and providing water to the megacities in the plains, providing microclimates, storing carbon in soil and vegetation. Nonetheless, these ecosystems are threatened by climate change and harmful practices, such as mining and conventional agriculture. Agroecology supports families living in these ecosystems and protects and supports these systems and their services.
Main beneficiaries
Local farmers and research organizations. Ultimately the project aims to reach 6,000 indirect beneficiaries and beyond (including 1,450 direct ones).
Strategy
Objectives
- Make farmer innovation for climate change adaptation visible and accessible to others and create spaces where they conduct trials, exchange knowledge and showcase their research results and innovations for climate change adaptation (Agroecological Adaptation LABs).
- Provide instruments for the exchange of innovations between communities who face difficulties in similar ecosystems, including through the farmbetter mobile extension app and WhatsApp.
- Strengthen farmer-led research to strengthen early-stage innovations through farmer led research designs, experimentation, relevant capacity-building and collaboration with researchers.
- Scale-up innovation in fostering the recognition of innovations and inventors. Put the innovations into practice through collaboration with farmers’ organizations, extension services, policy-makers and investors or donors.
Type/size of farms and type of food products: family farms, size around 1-5 ha; used to produce mainly potatoes, maize (corn), beans, vegetables and currently also produce products based on medicinal plants, cattle and small livestock.
Planned activities (2023-2028)
- Conduct a survey among 110 participants in the 3 countries in 2023.
- Assess survey results:
- Main climatic issues on agriculture according to survey’s participants were water scarcity, drought, winds and degraded soils.
- Main solutions identified were planting (agroforestry, reforestation, crop diversification and native species’), seed banks to protect native seeds, and water management practices (management water infiltration, setting up water reservoirs, water supply, organic composts).
- Define innovation:
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- Innovation is the “process of creating a new product, production process, service or management model that solves a specific problem” IICA, 2023.
- Innovation is a newly introduced process, product or service
- Innovation is a process, product or service from another place or which is rediscovered/preserved or that helps adapt.
- Besides, innovation is not always conscious (It can arise by chance; it can be a discovery), it is supported through research process (verification), it solves issues (related to climate change), and it is a dialogue process – exchange – posture.
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- Identify what constitutes a maturation process of innovation: An innovation starts to be implemented by a niche group, then SWISSAID supports farmers through agroecological labs so that they can undertake farmer-led research to do trials and errors around this innovation and decide whether it should be spread out further or not. Then, farmers reach out to the community to encourage them to implement the innovation as well. During this phase, it is important to get more academia and researchers onboard and do more research elsewhere with other farmers. Once the innovation shows positive, scientifically backed results in clearly described, different contexts, it can be scaled up in other ecosystems facing similar problems. The app is helpful in this regard.
- Identify innovative systems through the maturation process that they identified above:
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- Greenhouses to control temperatures
- Newly discovered crops for soil recovery
- Rescue native seeds via seed banks
- Temperature and rainfall monitoring to help people to take better decisions about where to plant the crops
- Agroforestry systems to help soil recovery and other ecosystem services
- Nutritional supplements for animals to have a better production.
- Collaborate with partners from the start, such as the respective farmer organizations, governmental and extension services, research organizations.
- Organize in-person workshops to foster farmer-led research.
- Developed didactical material on climate change risks and options for action (leaflets ,via the app, via videos – enlace al video¸ use the radio).
- Co-develop the farmbetter extension application to suit farmers’ needs and to enable innovation and knowledge exchanges via Whatsapp. The app has four key functions:
- Communication with facilitator/extension agent (or a lead farmer) via WhatsApp for those who have a problem to solve
- Upload farmers’ innovations into the application to share these with others
- Control panel for quality assurance regarding the innovations
- Database and library for those who want to browse WOCAT sustainable land management and climate change adaptation good practices.
- Forum / webpage (coming soon) to be able to communicate with the wider community of researchers, policymakers and donors or investors.
Effect and Impacts
Monitoring and Evaluation Methods
- Quantitative: actual direct and indirect beneficiaries of the project, and the number of innovations uploaded- and downloaded, are retained via the application.
- Qualitative objectives are monitored by the extension agents/facilitators via the different workshops (e.g. quality and satisfaction with the farmer-led research process).
- Barriers to innovation faced in each place will be collected through the planned forum/ webpage and/or the workshops.
Results and Lessons Learned
- Progress so far: 40 innovations to be uploaded by the end of 2024. Additional innovations researched and ready by end of 2026.
- Farmers are very interested in researching their innovations further and sharing them via app.
- The project invests in creating easily understandable content on the one hand AND the digital literacy of the communities on the other.
- Partners such as farmers’ organizations, NGOs and extension services welcome more efficient communication with the smallholder families, including on climate change adaptation.
- A financial mechanism which compensates farmers when an experiment goes wrong, helps maintain farmers’ willingness to invest in innovation.
- Identifying innovations and researching them more systematically requires prior co-creation processes within the communities and with research organizations willing to engage in farmer-led research.
- Longer follow-up time is required to see long-term effects of innovations on climate change mitigation and adaptation.
- Lead farmers and/or extension agents are key in the set-up for the knowledge exchange to be working: their didactical proportioning and sharing of WOCAT solutions via app and WhatsApp, and especially their technical inputs via app and WhatsApp regarding farmers’ innovations helps farmers work innovations and problems efficiently. However, this requires a careful selection of any new members of this lead farmer/extension agents’ group and may make scaling slower.
Limitations and barriers
- Connectivity issues in remote locations complicate the project’s outreach via app and WhatsApp. We are currently considering investing in offline technology.
- Financial means are key for the farmers to be able to respond to losses and damages due to climate change and to apply the developed solutions at larger scale in order to prevent future losses and damages.
- The project and app should ultimately be taken over by communities, extensionists and research partners in partnership to overcome potential barriers to sustainability.
- Establish horizontal co-creation of knowledge processes between researchers/academia and farmer-researchers to change the paradigms of conventional research and implement effective participatory action research processes, recognizing the local knowledge of the communities.
Contact
Sonja Tschirren, SWISSAID