Project News Volume 35

My name is Matsuda, and I am participating in the SHEP Biz project as an OJT from JICA headquarters. In this article, I would like to report on Periodical Data Survey (hereinafter referred to as PDS) conducted from 6th (Mon.) to 9th (Thu.) November in two sub-counties of Makueni County, Kaiti and Kilome, from an OJT's point of view.

-What is PDS?
It is a quantitative measure of the effectiveness of SHEP trainings by conducting a baseline survey of farmers before starting the SHEP approach to know their production and income and the level of adoption of recommended crop production techniques, and then conducting the exact same survey two years later to compare.

Let me ask a question to the readers here.
“In SHEP as well as in other technical cooperation projects, what do you think are the typical complaints that JICA has with the counterpart officials and beneficiaries who are the targets of technical transfer?”

I often hear that the beneficiaries do not actively participate in the project or training. From the beneficiary's point of view, JICA is just one of many donors, and unless there is a direct benefit to them, they may not actively participate in activities. However, in the project formulation phase, outcomes are set based on the assumption that beneficiaries will participate in the project or training. Of course, it depends on the beneficiaries, but it is also true that there are those who are not very interested.

In many technical cooperation projects, it is noticeable that counterpart staff have difficulty coordinating their schedules due to their regular duties that are concurrent with project activities, and beneficiaries are not likely to participate in training unless JICA pays them allowances and/or lunch fee. However, the model farmers who participated in this PDS all came to the training even though they did not learn any new techniques and were not paid any allowances! (34 out of 40 eligible farmers at
tended. (Four of the absentees were unable to participate due to a bridge being washed away by the torrential rains.) This is truly a wonderful thing.

Why such a high participation rate?

I thought there were two reasons for the high participation rate.
(1) There was a lot of group work during the training, which created a sense of unity in the group.
(2) The training was conducted over the course of a year and solid relationships were established between extension officers and farmers.
I believe that these reasons are because the training was structured according to self-determination theory, which is one of the concepts of the SHEP approach, and was designed to motivate the farmers. (Self-determination theory refers to the fact that farmers do not act based on the decisions of others, but rather discuss and draw their own conclusions. This theory is expected to improve three things: autonomy, competence, and relationships among farmers. (See link below for more details.) When we asked farmers why they actually participated in the program, they said that they wanted to exchange information with other farmers and that they were invited by the extension officer who has always been supportive.

In addition, of the four steps of SHEP, Step 1: Sharing goal with farmers and Farmers’ setting their vision, a briefing session on project activities will be held. At this meeting, SHEP will 1) explain that the Project will not distribute any allowances or agricultural materials to farmers (and under what conditions and what contents farmers will learn), 2) share examples of successful farmers, and 3) ask the target group to cooperate in PDS after two years. Only those farmers who agree to those conditions will participate in the Project. I believe that this kind of careful explanation at the beginning also strengthens the commitment of the farmers to the Project.

Throughout the training, the ties between the farmers and the extension officers have become stronger, and the PDS provided a good opportunity to share each farmer's experiences.

In this way, the SHEP approach is not only about technology transfer, but also about how local people can take ownership and be motivated by intrinsic motivation, and it is because the Project considers the characteristics of the local culture, resources, and community that it has produced such great results.

I think this concept of the SHEP approach can be applied to other technical cooperation projects or grant aid scheme for human resource development that I’m in charge of. It was a great asset for me to be able to accompany the farmers to the field where they actively participated in the survey!