{"id":3343,"date":"2020-10-08T08:48:40","date_gmt":"2020-10-08T08:48:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/recirculate\/?p=3343"},"modified":"2020-10-22T08:41:29","modified_gmt":"2020-10-22T08:41:29","slug":"communicating-research-part-one-its-good-to-talk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/wp.lancs.ac.uk\/recirculate\/2020\/10\/communicating-research-part-one-its-good-to-talk\/","title":{"rendered":"Communicating Research – Part One: It’s good to talk"},"content":{"rendered":"

Working with local communities for wider adoption of agricultural technologies in rural Africa<\/strong><\/p>\n

There is no doubt that having access to sufficient nutritious food remains an urgent priority for many millions of people across Africa. The 2020 Global Report on Food Crises (GRFC 2020)<\/a>, published by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation in August 2020, highlights the scale of the challenge. GRFC2020 highlighted that 27 million people in East Africa and more than 30 million people in Southern Africa were \u201cacutely food insecure\u201d.\u00a0 West Africa has not escaped this crisis: the FAO report describes more than 12 million people in 15 countries as acutely food insecure, including around 5 million in northern Nigeria.<\/p>\n

While Ghana has escaped the worst of these crises, more than half of Ghana\u2019s 6.8 million poor live in rural areas and most rely on agriculture for their livelihoods. \u00a0To achieve the inter-linked Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of ending poverty (SDG 1<\/a>), ending hunger (SDG 2<\/a>) and promoting health and well-being (SDG 3<\/a>) we need to ensure that poor farmers have access to scale-appropriate and eco-friendly technologies. Many researchers and scientists have proposed new technologies to improve productivity of farmers and other stakeholders. However, these well-intentioned innovations have often come to nothing. That raises an urgent question: \u201cwhy are promising techniques not adopted?\u201d<\/p>\n

I have no doubt that there are many reasons for this failure, but in my experience one important reason is simply the lack of communication between researchers and farmers. It\u2019s clear that others within the GCRF-funded<\/a> RECIRCULATE project see the same issue. That\u2019s evident for example from the experience of our sister institute, CSIR Industrial Research Institute<\/a>, and the lively discussions within RECIRCULATE\u2019s PARTICIPATE forum.<\/a>\u00a0Poor communication is itself a highly complex problem.\u00a0 Many Sub-Saharan Africa smallholder farmers often have poor roads and communications infrastructure, and lack access to information because of poor extension contacts, limited cooperative membership, and illiteracy.\u00a0 Those large-scale infrastructure limitations are beyond anything that researchers can hope to solve. But, we can look at ourselves and our attitudes to communication.<\/p>\n

It sometimes seems to me that many researchers still think that it is too difficult or time-consuming to co-design and co-evaluate technologies with end users. So let me put these two question to you.<\/p>\n