Last week, we welcomed Emilie Smith Dumont to kick off a collaboration between Dahari and the World Agroforestry Centre: ICRAFThis field visit was made possible thanks to financial support from the Darwin Initiative.

A researcher for the past five years at the World Agroforestry Centre based in Nairobi, Emilie specializes in the analysis of agroforestry systems. She spent ten days with the Dahari teams in Adda to conduct a reconnaissance mission with Richard Benyingme, a Cameroonian master’s student at Bangor University in the United Kingdom.

The aim of these ten days in the field was to interview farmers and organize focus groups on their agricultural knowledge and how they manage the trees on their plots, in order to enable ICRAF toidentify where support for Dahari is needed. Now that the methodology is in place, Richard will continue the study for one month.

ICRAF’s approach—both within this partnership and more broadly—is to gather and elevate farmers’ knowledge, integrating it with technical and scientific expertise to improve agroforestry. The goal is to understand why a given intervention succeeded, for whom it worked, and, most importantly, the reasons behind that success.

The partnership will thus make it easier to harness research for the purpose of development.

These field interviews notably showed that support could focus on theimprovement of agricultural production, watershed management, and monitoring and evaluationIn practical terms, this will entail capacity building, training, support for the implementation of Dahari projects, and assessments that incorporate both technical and scientific components.

Before leaving, Emilie shared her impressions regarding the initiatives undertaken by Dahari since 2013: I was particularly impressed by the range of initiatives Dahari carries out regarding integrated watershed management and agricultural intervention, with the goal of reconciling productivity and the conservation of natural resources at a landscape scale.

I also found the participatory approach and the pursuit of scientific evidence to be relevant for developing synergies between interventions tailored to the specific environment and communities..