Improving Organic Resource use in rural Ethiopia (IPORE)

The shortage of organic resources in rural Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) for improving long term energy, food and water provision is one of the region's greatest challenges. The Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples' Region in Ethiopia (SNNPR) provides an excellent case study for transdisciplinary research on how community sustainability and resilience might be improved by better use of organic resources. Organic resources are scarce, with seasonality causing significant variation in available water across the year, while diverse cultural norms and institutional arrangements, framing access to land, water and energy, emphasise that the success and impact of interventions depends on complex interactions between what science makes possible and how decisions are made by individuals and communities.

In a Nexus Network grant, engagement with farmers, householders and policy makers from Halaba District and the wider SNNPR identified key Nexus challenges as complex, multi-dimensional and inter-connected. The interaction between the use of organic resources for energy, water and food in the region is dynamic, extremely complex and highly spatially variable. As elsewhere in SSA, most of the rural population use solid biomass for cooking and heating, with wood, dung and crop residues the main energy sources. However, these resources are also crucial to long term sustainable food production and water use. Dung and crop residues provide organic fertilisers that improve water holding capacity of the soil. Demands on organic wastes for fuel and livestock feed reduce the use of dung and crop residues as soil amendments, which reduces biomass production and organic inputs to the soil.

Soil carbon loss and deforestation have also been a cause of significant soil erosion in Ethiopia, while many households have responded to diminishing biomass availability by planting fast growing and water hungry tree species on home plots, such as Eucalyptus, which negatively impact food production and potentially reduce groundwater availability. Governance arrangements which frame access to resources are also key. For example, traditional open animal grazing practices can determine the amount of crop residues retained in fields and undermine the maintenance of water harvesting structures.

Shortage of organic resources also results from the difficulties faced by farmers in responding to changing (and increasingly erratic) seasons. Water scarcity in the typical extensive livestock system means that farmers spend significant periods away from the homestead, taking their livestock to water; this reduces time available for other activities. Lack of proximate water in the dry season (or throughout the year due to absence or breakdown of community pumps), impacts the time spent by household members (typically women and children) collecting water, and also affects school attendance.

The spatial variability in organic resources, and formal and informal cultural norms and social institutions means that successful policy interventions need to be adapted to the specific local context. This requires appropriate locally specific scientific and socio-economic data, and engagement with policy makers and other stakeholders so that proposed solutions are jointly owned.

This project will increase our understanding of the interactions between food, energy and water associated with organic resource use in this specific geographical and social context, and will help identify appropriate locally adapted solutions to improve community sustainability and resilience. This will provide a model for application of transdisciplinary Nexus thinking to improve policy design.

The academic impacts of this project provide a clear pathway to sustainable development impacts. A greater understanding of the interactions between food, energy and water associated with organic resource use in specific geographical and social contexts will enable improved policy design, hence helping ensure that that policy interventions to improve organic resource use are adopted and sustained by the communities involved.

Our Pathways to Impact fulfills the following objectives; (1) Policy - to integrate and package research outputs for immediate uptake by government agencies, (2) Public - to conduct knowledge exchange activities and provide publicly accessible findings of our research and its relevance.

The proposal emerged directly from activities within a Nexus networking grant, where the academic team engaged with a range of non-academic stakeholders to develop the proposal. The academic research will continue to be shaped by continuing engagement with regional and local policy makers, NGOs, farmers and other householders, and by interactions between disciplines. This process of local stakeholder engagement via workshops and focus groups throughout will maximize relevance of the research and ensure its implications can be embedded in policy design and practice by local government and NGOs.

In an initial stakeholder workshop with local and regional policy makers, a set of options will be developed that are of interest to policy makers to improve local organic resource use, identifying (bundles of) technologies and approaches, and considering governance and economic issues. In addition, a set of scenarios will be identified that characterize the backdrop for evaluation of potential options in terms of climate, demographic, and (macro) economic change. These options and the wider outcomes of the workshop will shape subsequent data collection and analysis.

Drawing on the analyses undertaken, a final stakeholder workshop will critically evaluate the options within the selected scenarios and assess their implications. Lessons that are translatable to the national context will be presented to appropriate government departments in Ethiopia by Southern Agricultural Research Institute and Hawassa University; those that are internationally relevant will be highlighted by the International Water Management Institute and presented to relevant UK agencies by University of Aberdeen and the James Hutton Institute (DFID and Scottish Government International Development Unit).

Communication to policy and wider non-academic audiences will be facilitated by the production of non-technical policy briefs associated with academic reports and papers produced. In addition, the team will also produce a quarterly blog on emerging issues relevant to the project, which will be disseminated by Twitter by University of Aberdeen and the James Hutton Institute. A report will be produced for each workshop and provided to stakeholders.

As part of the process of engagement with stakeholders in the project we will identify current national and international policy debates around organic resource use which the research outcomes could influence practice and help inform policy formation. Key policy stakeholders will be contacted 12 months after the end of the project to provide an evaluation of the longer term impact of the research on the policy formation process.
The effectiveness of communication to wider public will be evaluated by number of page views and retweets of blogs and policy briefs.