Last week, we welcomed Emilie Smith Dumont to start a collaboration between Dahari and the World Agroforestry Center: ICRAF. This field visit was made possible thanks to the financial support of the Darwin Initiative.
A researcher for five years for the World Agroforestry Center based in Nairobi, Emilie is a specialist in the analysis of agroforestry systems. She followed the Dahari teams for ten days in Adda in order to make 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 discussion groups on their agricultural knowledge, on how they manage the trees on their plot to allow ICRAF toidentify where support in Dahari is needed. With the methodology now in place, Richard will continue the study for a month.
ICRAF's approach, through this partnership but also in general, is therefore to collect and share peasant knowledge while integrating it with technical and scientific knowledge, so as to improve agroforestry. The challenge is therefore to understand why a particular intervention worked, for whom and above all why.
The partnership will thus make it possible to better make research available for development.
These field interviews showed in particular that the support could focus onimprovement of agricultural production, watershed development and monitoring and evaluation. Concretely, capacity building, training, support for the implementation of Dahari projects, diagnostics with the integration of the technical and scientific component are therefore to be expected.
Before leaving, Emilie shared with us her impressions of the achievements undertaken by Dahari since 2013: I was particularly impressed by the range of actions that Dahari is carrying out in terms of integrated watershed development and agricultural intervention with the aim of reconciling productivity and conservation of natural resources at the landscape scale.
I also found the participatory approach and the quest for scientific evidence relevant to developing synergies between interventions adapted to the environment and communities..
