Humidtropics has been working closely with national partners from the Research for Development (R4D) Platform of the Program’s Nicanorte Action Site in Central America and the Caribbean. As the Territorial Learning Alliances continue strengthening their collective learning and innovation spaces while expanding the reach of R4D projects in the region, local partners met with the Humidtropics team to discuss completed and ongoing research activities, as well as further defining the national R4D Platform’s role in the territories to achieve Humidtropics’ R4D goals in Nicaragua.
Research and development partners at the national level, all members of the Nicanorte National R4D Platform, gathered to define next steps in the joint initiatives being carried out in Nicaragua.
Taking Humidtropics’ innovative, integrated territorial analysis approach as a starting point, this exchange allowed each involved organization to consider every component which influences the agricultural sector, starting from the individual rural family and community levels, up to levels of policy and decision making, academics and capacity building, and markets and commercialization. R4D Platform partners stated the importance of reaching more farmers with less technicians in order to scale tools and technologies beyond the farms currently being studied, establishing both the R4D Platform and the Territorial Learning Alliances as ideal structures for this purpose.
An important theme discussed revolved around the historical and cultural factors linked to low productivity. R4D Platform representatives highlighted the importance of generating tools to identify widespread beliefs, which manifest themselves through the decision-making process carried out in the farms. It was pointed out that these factors limit farm families’ possibilities for production and success, often conditioned towards failure through a social history of debt and loss, and a lack of training on how to best manage the potential of their limited available resources.
During the discussion, partners highlighted the importance of continuing to work for the sustainability of the region by building networks of collaboration and strengthening links between organizations through ongoing participation in the system at a territorial level, through regional councils and theme groups. Another element proposed was the link between agricultural development projects and university training courses at both undergraduate and graduate levels, encouraging rural students through the creation of development niches within their own territories and communities, with a strong focus on topics related to gender and institutional innovation.
The current projects led by Humidtropics through the R4D Platform include initiatives for multiple certification of coffee farms, analyses of public policies and their impact on rural women’s agency, capacity building on data interpretation for on-farm decision-making processes, early alert systems for crop plagues and diseases, and market access analyses. Furthermore, partners listed themes of growing importance at a local, national, and regional level, including water harvesting and management, agrobiodiversity, productivity and agroecology, climate-smart farms and communities, policy analyses on women’s land ownership, agricultural technology innovation policies, institutional innovation, and social movements related to research for development initiatives.
Blog and photo by Shadi Azadegan, Communication Specialist, Central America and the Caribbean, CIAT.