Agri-water mini Share Fair- Overall Report

Date: Thursday 3rd February 2011
Location: Large Auditorium, ILRI Campus, Addis Ababa, ETHIOPIA
Organised by: International Water Management Institute, supported by Peter Ballantyne, ILRI KMIS and facilitated by Nadia Manning-Thomas, CGIAR ICT-KM Program
03/02/2011 ILRI Campus, ETHIOPIA
Water and Agriculture Share Fair
Agri-Water Mini Share Fair: Report

Rationale and Objectives
“Many project meetings going on during same week, all in Addis. So a great opportunity to bring together the different project representatives to exchange information on project scope, objectives, methodologies, to identify areas of overlap, gaps, corresponding and contrasting methodologies and views, leading to a better fit between the projects”
Charlotte de Fraiture, Scientist and Project Leader, IWMI in discussions about planning the Agri-Water Share Fair
“We need to capitalize on every opportunity we have to really collaborate and know what is going on in different places. This is an excellent opportunity to do that and to network, and to begin to think ahead to future projects.”
Quote from Timothy Williams, Africa Director, IWMI on opening the Agri-Water Share Fair

Agenda Overview

Getting to know each other
Part 1:

Activity: ‘Speed dating’
Charlotte de Fraiture (IWMI)
Meredith Giordano (IWMI)
Alexandra Evans (IWMI)
Nicole LeFore (IWMI)
AditiMukherji (IWMI)
RegassaNamara (IWMI)
RavinderMlik (IWMI)
Barbara van Koppen (IWMI)
Steve Cinderby (SEI)
Rudolph Cleveringa (IFAD)
Ian Wright (Consultant)
DomitilleVallee (FAO)
Leone Magliocchetti-Lombi (FAO)
Timothy Williams (IWMI)
Kees Swaans (ILRI)
Peter Ballantyne (ILRI)
Matthew McCartney (IWMI)
Lisa Rebelo (IWMI)
WimBastiaansen (Water Watch)
Frank van Steenbergen (MetaMeta)
Abraham MehariHaile (UNESCO-IHE)
…and a few others who came in and out during the course of the day!
Participants were given 15 minutes to move around the room and meet as many people as possible and sharing:
Name
Where from/live/work
Organisation and position
…what they wanted to be as a child!
Deborah Bossio(IWMI)
Claudius Chikozho (IWMI)
Katherine Snyder (IWMI)
JP Venot (IWMI)
Tilahun Amede (ILRI/IWMI)
Prue Loney (IWMI)
Diego Valbuena (ILRI)
Douglas Merrey (Consultant)
BancyMati (Consultant)
TadelleSelassie (IWMI)
Stefanos Xenarios (IWMI)
Nadia Manning-Thomas (CGIAR ICT-KM/ILRI)
David Molden (IWMI)
LennekeKnoop (MetaMeta)
Nihal Fernando (World Bank)

Share Fair Participants

Activity: Spectrums
Participants were asked to place them physically along a line in the room that represented the following spectrums. ..and were asked to look at where everyone else had placed themselves and also asked why they chose that position

Getting to know the projects
Part 2

Activity: Project presentations
AgWater Solutions
AWM in Challenging Contexts
Rethinking climate change and water storage
CPWF NBDC
IMAWESA
SmartICTs
Spate Irrigation network
Groundwater
The Water Channell
MUS
Projects/network/activities were given an opportunity to briefly present an overview about themselves, using a common template which included:
Title slide providing project name, lead organisation, key partners, budget, and duration
Map your location
What is the project trying to achieve
What approaches in the project using
Who is the project working with and for
Project unique selling points: 2 things it is good at, and 1 challenge or struggle the project has
Synthesis of these components are found on following slides…

Check out the Project presentations…
http://www.slideshare.net/ictkm/agriwater-share-fair-projects-presentations

Who is involved: Funders and Lead organisations
Funders:
IFAD
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
UNESCO-IHE
Cap-Net
UNESCO-IHP
World bank
Challenge Program on Water and Food
Danida
FAO
WSSCC,
Other various
Lead organisations:
MetaMeta
Nymphaea
IWMI
UNESCO-IHE
WaterWatch
Global MUS Group
Others

Who is involved: Key partners
UN agencies:
FAO
UNESCO-IHE
Research partners
SEI
IRC
Winrock
WRI
CGIAR Centres:
IFPRI,
IWMI
Country partners:
Ghana: ISSER, WRI
Ethiopia: EEA, AMU, OWRB, HU, MoWR
Germany: PIK, ZEF
Yemen (WEC)
Pakistan (SPO, PARC),
Sudan (MoWR),
Donors:
IFAD
Projects:
IFAD projects,
Challenging Contexts
AWM Solutions
IDE
CH2MHill
WaterWatch
Basfood
DLV-Plant
Cap-Net
GSE
Universities:
UDS in Ghana
IDS
AAU
Local partners
…and many more!

Budgets

Project durations
Smart ICTs
MUS
MUS
Groundwater
The Water Channel
Projects
CPWF (NBDC)
Spate Irrigation
IMAWESA (2)
IMAWESA (1)
AWM in CC (3 years)
Rethinking CC and storage
AWM Solutions (3 years)
2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 ….
Years

Geographical areas
This is a tag cloud of all the countries mentioned by the projects in their presentations. The varying size of the country names indicates frequency of their mention.

What do the projects want to achieve…the most common words

Top 50 words used in describing the projects’ approaches

Collective strengths:
Stakeholder engagement
Dialogue with key stakeholders throughout the project
Closely working with the national and regional partners to spur widespread innovation, policy influence and institutional strengthening and reform in combination with rainwater management interventions;
A lively global community which is learning rapidly about cost-effective knowledge generation on innovative community-driven multiple-use water services
Network
Research/Technical capacity
Focus on institutional context across scales: from local to National
Climate, hydrological and water resource modeling
Anthropological research
Hydrogeological and socio-economic assessments
Evidence
Evidence based (!) solutions and business models
Objective solid evidence from the field
Knowledge Sharing and Capacity Building
Open source sharing
Cross-basin learning, knowledge sharing and continual communication for adaptive management
Capacity building in AWM and in knowledge sharing skills, and knowledge sharing platform.
Provide local and specific assistance, quasi real time
The largest water related video collection
drawing upon lessons from Asia
Implementation and solutions
Focus on practicals and do-ables
Implement new projects quickly (DVD package, live streaming, develop materials)
A concrete solution for all investments in water infrastructure, and if well targeted, the best way to use water for empowering women, the land-poor, disabled and other marginalized

Challenges
Partnership
Sustaining functional partnership, beyond financial incentives
Operationalizing a strong learning alliance to generate and share knowledge in a way that responds to our target group needs, is participatory and inclusive and increases the use of research outputs.
Communication, outreach and impact
Converting a set of complex information captured in researchy language into a simple slick message appealing to demanding donors and high level policy makers
Creative and effective outreach
Outreach – linking to relevant government personnel and others
Engage much more with people from outside the water world
Avoiding that investment programs remain business as usual
Project Operation
Fund raising is difficult, because of the single-water use silos among donors and disciplinary boxes of scientists, and low costs of e.g. the global MUS Group
Time: 3 years isn’t enough!
Scope: vast region and many challenges
Clients’ challenges
Not all beneficiaries having access to water and fertilizers

For more information on Projects/Networks/Activities involved
www.awm-solutions.iwmi.org
www.thewaterchannel.tv
www.spate-irrigation.org
www.waterandfood.org
http://nilebdc.wordpress.com
http://africastorage-cc.iwmi.org
www.musgroup.net
A flip chart sheet was made available for participants to provide websites, blogs or other sources of information on projects and related activities. To the left is what was provided:

Other related projects/networks/activities
Use of ICT’s for delivery of direct subsidies in India
Funded by World Bank,
Linking farmers and electric utilities
[Presented by AditiMukherji]
AGWA
IWMI is a member
Opportunities for scaling up investment in AgWater
ESA and WCA and Pan Africa Committees
Working with NEPAD and CAADP policies
[Presented by Doug Merrey]

Activity: Projects ‘marketplace’
Projects/networks were each given a space in the auditorium to display posters, documents and other materials. Participants were invited to move around the ‘marketplace’ to visit the various projects and learn more about them.

Project Synthesis and Synergies
Part 3

Activity: Finding the common elements and challenges, observations and Aha! moments
All working on agricultural water
All working in Ethiopia
Not clear on target groups, end users and clients
All challenged by outreach—looking to improve
Many projects using Learning Alliances as a mechanism—even in same areas
Difficult to use websites
Information is difficult to access by real users
Projects/networks did not share with each other early on—a lot of parallel and overlapping work
Common assumption that research will turn into change
“Where is the research for development?”
There is a vast range of multiple clients
After the project presentations, the participants were asked is there were any commonalities across the projects. They were also asked to provide any observations, comments, and Aha! Moments.

Activity: Group discussion on key cross-cutting topics
Data sharing
Achieving impact and change
Research communication and getting the message out
Learning Alliances
Understanding the clients
Working in similar countries
Based on the presentations of the projects and subsequent discussions- a list of topics based on common tasks, challenges and goals was presented back to the participants. They were asked to consider if this was a representative list of topics that could/should be discussed or pursued further.
After some discussion and modifications, the participants arrived at a consensus for four main topics(in the blue box) to be the basis for smaller group discussions.
The results of the group discussions can be found in the following slides.

Group 1: Data sharing
Harmonise and gather
Identify focal persons in each projects
Develop inventory booklets saying what data is available
Write joint papers where data is integrated and used together
Validate data with external sources
Incentivize people by putting datasets into IOPs and evaluations

Group 2: Learning Alliances
Develop common understanding on Learning Alliances mechanism through definition and objectives
Share what is working or not
Explore and share what is already happening and build on that
Work together on Learning Alliances
Consider the institutional challenges
Use an existing platform as a partnership-create joint agenda, events
Make use of IMAWESA network

Group 3: Research communication/getting the message out
Thinking about research communication in two ways:
Communicating ABOUT the research
Communicating THE research
Developing key contacts—can share these
‘Slick’ communication of the science can happen once the science is ready and has been communicated in its traditional avenues (e.g journals, etc)
Develop and share a list of appropriate and successful tools that work for projects
Share examples
Develop videos
What do we mean by project communications?
Communications start high and finish high with a lull in the middle and stop at end of project. What do we want our communications to be?
We have to communicate about the science, the project and the organization and this needs to start early and the buzz needs to continue throughout the whole project.

Continued…Group 3: Research communication/getting the message out
Meetings/milestones – different type of communication
Slick messages – are the science messages we need to get out when we are ready
Tools/template to be given to project at the beginning to help project understand what types of communications are applicable for their project and what tools are best for their type of project. Need to share appropriate tools with each other
Even if we have great messages who do we send them to? We need good up-to-date effective contacts lists
PLEDGE: Tilahun Amede to give an example on communication through guides

Group 4: Making change, achieving impact (knowing our clients)
Question of who our clients are? Donors, Government (link in with University system), private industry- Multiple clients to satisfy
& whether it is possible to change our clients to make change and achieve impact.
Donors – not so easy
Government – need to keep good people in government (financial incentives to keep them there?) to help train up junior staff to build capacity. We need to help empower government
University – involve more in projects – builds local capacity.
Private sector – increases competition if they are helped to become involved
Long term projects needed – good to see linkages between projects that are finishing and ending

Continued…Group 4: Making change, achieving impact (knowing our clients)
Accountability – who are you accountable to – donor, especially where we are trying to change the way in which the donor invests.
Don’t you find it’s so donor driven that we don’t necessarily meet the needs of the countries as per their country plan because donors revert to their comfort zones. We feed into individual projects rather than country processes.
We write proposals and over promise.
Lack of technical expertise in donor; lack of understanding governments and the constraints that they work under. We need to create solutions that are politically possible to implement.
Get inside donors more but also get inside government more.
Our target is the poor but do we actually get through to them?
Donors are critical for injecting ideas into governments. So on one hand they impose on us but are also useful tools for us to reach governments.
But all donor governments also have their agendas.
Have we been adequately looking at the capacity that our clients have.

We go to the people that we want to change far too late. We go when we’ve already got an idea or a funded project.
Is it possible to engage these donors to the extent that you can actually influence what they fund?
Often only work with one or two people in a ministry and when they leave it falls apart. Would like to see more collaboration with universities and students on projects.
We need to get the right technical expertise on development projects.
There are lots of people with expertise in country but they are not staying because there is not enough money in it.
How do we instill practical experience into young graduates?
Should we be building up the water bureaus or private companies?
How can we engage government and other stakeholders in the project as project partners not just as boundary partners or invitees to workshops?

Are there things that we as researchers are doing wrong that we should change to achieve impact? Are we competing too much to achieve impact?
Continuity is an issue – our intuitional priorities change.
To what extent should researchers achieve impact? We should be achieving outcomes but impact are too far away from us.
If we want to achieve practical outcomes is it really feasible? What do we need to do to achieve it?
Do the clients e.g. donors and NGOs – need to also change the way that they do business.
We won’t change the donors and the people they recruit, so do we empower governments more? Do we need to empower the private sector?
But the private sector is mainly profit driven. What is their role?
How do we introduce these social and political components into our “business models”?

Activity: Pledging
Pledges:
Doug Merrey- success measured by extent to which IFAD changes its investments in response to our suggestions . Pledge to work to better understand IFAD structure to know how/who/when to influence—and will share this information
DomitilleVallee- Understand better the gates Foundation and also share solutions and information with FAO
Nicole LeFore(IWMI)- set up a virtual space for projects to continue sharing and communicating (e.g Yammer community)
Tilahun Amede (IWMI/ILRI)-Involving other projects in the National Platform his program is setting up in Ethiopia around (rain)water management
David Molden (IWMI)- IWMI Management team to support better communication on joint topics and across projects
During the group work-participants were asked to not only discuss the topics but to come up with possible action points of how the projects could collaborate, share or work together related to those particular topics. After the groups gave their feedback, participants were asked to make ‘pledges’ for tasks or activities to take some of the action points or other ideas forward. Participants were asked to only make pledges that they were serious about carrying out. The pledges made can be seen to the right:

Credits
Idea and follow-through: Thank you to IFAD for pushing this idea and to IWMI for following through with it.
Planning: Charlotte de Fraiture (IWMI), Nicole LeFore(IWMI), Peter Ballantyne (ILRI), and Nadia Manning-Thomas (ICT-KM Program/ILRI)
Report: Nadia Manning-Thomas (CGIAR ICT-KM Program/ILRI)
Notes and other information: Alexandra Evans (IWMI), Prue Loney (IWMI), Nicole LeFore (IWMI)
Photographs of Share Fair: Nadia Manning-Thomas (CGIAR ICT-KM program/ILRI)
Presentations: Thank you to all the projects/network/activities for sharing their information—all information and images are from those projects
All the people who helped organise the Share fair and supported is operation on the ILRI Campus.
Thank you to all the participants for their time, energy, ideas and commitment to sharing knowledge!

Agri-water mini Share Fair- Overall Report

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