Participatory impact assessment (cf. AFD FISONG “Rural Development 2019” project)

Organic and agro-ecological production is increasingly recognised for its role in solving the food security and nutritional problems of a rapidly growing population, and is also seen as an essential component of strategies for mitigating and adapting to climate change and conserving biodiversity.

This is particularly the case in Africa, where the development of organic farming, hampered by a number of obstacles, must respond to a clear public health challenge. While awareness is growing at a political level, notably within the African Union, players in the sector have felt the need to create synergies across the continent to help organic farming take a real place in African development by developing AfrONet, the African organic farming network, based in Tanzania.

A transition to organic farming requires simultaneous action throughout the food system. To achieve continental scale in terms of geographical presence and organisational capacity, as well as in terms of distributed and autonomous activities, the players in the food system today need to commit not only to agronomic technological innovations in production and processing, but also to building fair and inclusive markets.

Hence the development of the IIABA project (Institutional Innovations for Organic Agriculture in Africa), which consists of various actions to put in place, beyond production and processing, institutional innovations for the organic farming sector, concerning markets, guarantee systems and public policies. These three main components of the project are accompanied by two complementary components: ‘Management and coordination’ and ‘Communication and dissemination’.

To coordinate this IIABA project with the FISONG mechanism (financing international solidarity projects), AFD has launched a highly competitive FISONG-2019 call for tenders in 2019, with a budget of €1.45 million, on “Partnerships for the production, marketing and certification of organic or agro-ecological products in response to local socio-economic and environmental issues”. This project also mobilises the SAVi mechanisms created in 2017 by the IISD, the FAO and One Planet Network (see OECD Tools for addressing SDGs…).

For INRAE, which won the tender with the proposal from UMR LISIS, jointly with CIRAD, this project should contribute to the objectives of the GloFoodS and Metabio metaprogrammes (new metaprogramme on “Scaling up AGRIBIO”).

IIABA will initially support three pilot countries: Morocco, Tanzania and Uganda, where it will run until the end of 2023. In these countries, the organic farming movements are members of AfrONet, but the situations differ in terms of agro-ecological zones, converted farmland and the number of organic farmers. IIABA aims to catalyse a change of scale in organic farming in order to facilitate its development and envisage the extension of various innovations to members on the African continent.

It has three specific objectives

1. to identify institutional innovations that will enable a change of scale in ecological and organic farming in the pilot countries ;
2. consolidating the capacities of AfrONet and its members;
3. dissemination of targeted institutional innovations in partner countries and within AfrONet.

and three main axes:

1. building innovative markets
2. creation of credibility/quality systems (participatory certification),
3. setting up public policies.

The aim is also to support stakeholders in adopting these innovations, the open typology of which includes food security strategies (and not just economic ones, e.g. exports), as well as the challenges of climate change.

The IIABA project was supposed to be implemented by the usual NGOs, but the INRAE-Cirad alliance changed all that by bringing together researchers and local NGOs in each of the three pilot countries: TOAM (Kilimohai) in Tanzania, NOGAMU in Uganda, and FIMABio and RIAM in Morocco.

The research-action part on agro-ecological transition issues in Uganda will be supervised by Allison LOCONTO (LISIS-INRAE) and Ève FOUILLEUX (LISIS-CNRS/Cirad), with the involvement of Arlène ALPHA and Sylvaine LEMEILLEUR from the UMR MoISA. LISIS will also be responsible for an original participatory impact assessment approach, with the involvement of a post-doc.

The expected results include the supply of guides and tools that should enable the three pilot countries, AfrONet and its African partners to continue and strengthen the construction of the initiatives underway.