173 – Twenty years of RMS for CRFS

Lucie: [00:00:00] Hi, and welcome to the IDEMS Podcast. My name’s Lucie Hazelgrove Planel, I’m a Social Impact Scientist and anthropologist, and I’m here today with David Stern, one of the founding directors of IDEMS. Hi David.

David: Hi Lucie. I’m really looking forward to this discussion. Do you want to start off by telling us a little bit about where this has come from?

Lucie: So next year, I think it’s the 20th anniversary of the community of practice in West Africa which we support. So a community of researchers as part of the Global Collaboration for Resilient Food Systems. We’re in a particular case where we have access to some of the old people, let’s say, who were providing research methods support before we became involved, both of you and I.

David: Let’s put this into context. So 20 years for a research program is immense, this is huge, this is rare. In the West African context, we are talking specifically Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali. A 20 year research program [00:01:00] in three of the poorest countries in the world is almost unheard of. 

Lucie: That is very true. 

David: So this is something which has been supported consistently by the McKnight Foundation and has grown into something which I find one of the most rewarding parts of my work, and it’s a big part of what you do now. You’ve been doing it now for four years, is it? 

Lucie: Three, three years. 

David: And I’ve been doing this for just over a decade, which has formed a lot of my thinking, I’ve discussed this in previous episodes. But the program goes back 20 years and actually our role as research methods support goes back basically 20 years. So you are going to over the next few weeks, months, have a series of episodes coming out where you are [00:02:00] gathering stories, where you are getting insights out of the experiences, not just from the program, but which relate the program.

Lucie: And one particular aspect of that is how, and we’re going to start off with how the research methods within the program have also changed and what learnings there have been within those 20 years of what makes good agricultural research.

David: Absolutely. And I want to clarify. This isn’t just about agricultural research because the general ideas that are coming out of this, these have come into the work that I’ve done with the parenting work, these have influenced, if you want, parenting randomized control trials at scale. So there’s ways in which my learnings from these experiences have influenced that. There’s elements where they’ve influenced our work in climate, in education. It is just deep thinking, which has gone into how to do good research [00:03:00] in our DNA.

Lucie: Often participatory research too, so involving people always, or involving the study participants, the people for whom the research will eventually help ideally. 

David: Sorry, it’s not just ideally, this has been the big shift within the program, even in the 10 years that I’ve been involved, just over 10 years. So when I started, that was already really important. But I would argue that the methods around it at that point were very experimental is the wrong word, because they were using established methods. But there were elements where the established methods were not enough for the context that we’ve been working in. And so elements of that have been evolving.

Lucie: My ideally was in regards to research doesn’t always come out with solutions that we want. So you could be doing research and then you find out that actually you haven’t found something which is going to help farmers. 

David: [00:04:00] Absolutely. And this is something where in the broader picture, and this is why it’s related to the parenting work we’ve done and other things, actually good research historically, and I go back maybe a hundred years on this, was all about isolating the research question from the complexity of society and putting it into a lab condition or into a condition which was controlled so that you would get a clean scientific result.

And a lot of what we’ve been engaging in is the process of actually saying, okay, we have quite a lot of clean scientific results, which we don’t know how they translate into real world context. And so a big challenge, I believe, for research and researchers in general at the moment is that was the right approach in an era of data [00:05:00] scarcity. And we are now moving into this era of data abundance where there’s a lot of data and what’s happening is quite a lot of that data is being used not in this way to generate scientific results, but to influence society.

Lucie: Yep.

David: And actually, what would it look like if researchers were using that abundance of data to actually generate knowledge? This is a big part of what has been emerging, and we’re not the only people working on this, this is certainly not the only program engaging with these ideas. But it is a program which has had 20 year history in a place which is a very low resource environment, very culturally diverse, and interesting. 

I’m [00:06:00] not trying to say the rest of the world isn’t interesting, but I do believe very strongly that the Sahel region in West Africa is a very interesting cultural mix.

Lucie: With absolutely no bias in what you’re saying at all.

David: Well, it is not the just that my heart lives in Niger, but it is. There’s no disputing that there are interesting social structures, there’s interesting cultural phenomena, there’s interesting small communities. 

Lucie: Exactly. And so what I was just going to say is that in relation to what you’re talking about, data, that we are now not in a period of data scarcity, yeah, within this period of 20 years that whole data environment has completely changed as well, which motivates changes in research methods.

And then also one of the reasons that this community of practice is so interesting is that there are farmer federations who are really aware and wanting to have control over their data. And they’re pushing for that. We are having [00:07:00] to respond to that, so it’s really an interesting, as you say, environment to work in.

David: Absolutely. And that in terms of, again, I come back to my bias towards being really interested in the West African culture, but this culture of having these institutional structures, like these farmer federations, this is something which is a really powerful way to engage with the local communities through institutions, which are theirs rather than external institutions or institutions which are governmental.

This is something where there’s not every region that I work in where you have such strong institutions, which are really grassroots institutions. And that’s, for the work that we do, and the way of actually flipping research around, [00:08:00] this issue about data ownership and the fact that these grassroots organizations care about data ownership, this is rare and it gives this opportunity for an engagement with research, which is, I believe, a model that others could be looking at.

But it is only possible because we have these grassroots community-based organizations. Without that, it wouldn’t work.

Lucie: Now another model which is potentially interesting, is how we now do research methods support, or how we envisage our support for these grants, or the research projects in the region. ’cause that as well has changed within the last 20 years. And I think we’ve also discussed that on previous episodes. But it’s also, yeah, it’s also a different approach to, I guess, working in a region and supporting a region.

David: And it’s something where we are certainly in our infancy, I would argue, [00:09:00] with the new approach we’re taking. And just to be clear, this is an approach which has built out of these internships where we’ve got local apprentices who are essentially learning the trade of research method support on the ground in these countries, with the hope and expectation that they will then be able to scale out, if you want, the service of research method support in their local environments beyond just the program, but also for the program.

The need that the local partners have for research methods support far outweighs what we as an external support group can do. And so that shift towards really recognizing that actually this need warrants a substantial effort and therefore putting in place the local infrastructure to be able to give that effort. These [00:10:00] are really important things.

I’m conscious we haven’t really focused in on the origin. So I think that would be a good place to start. So if we go back 20 years to when the West African community of practice was born, and I know you are going to actually get into this in some of your future episodes, but I think it’s worth us just sort of discussing this a little bit.

The importance of research methods support as a concept emerged, I would argue, almost by accident. And I’m telling these stories secondhand, but I think it is worth sort of me at least giving my perspective on this before you dig in and actually gain other voices and other perspectives on this.

Lucie: Great. Yep.

David: As I understand it, there’s a [00:11:00] general perception in agricultural research that, yeah, statistics can be useful, but it’s not something that most people want to engage in. And this is something where very rarely do your agricultural research say, oh, whoopee, I’m going to be doing some statistics. 

Lucie: Yeah, I haven’t noticed that. Yeah.

David: And so there is always this expectation that statistical support is something which is needed but not enjoyable. It’s like taking your medicine. You really know it’s good for you, but it’s not something you are doing for pleasure. And my understanding is that there was a workshop, a training that was given where the reviews of that training were different and they said, we really enjoyed this, we understood why this was useful and why it was helping us in different ways.

And [00:12:00] on the back of that sort of positive review, when an opportunity emerged, and this came and credit should be given to the Gates Foundation, who identified the work that was happening and said, I believe it was something like they doubled the money of the whole research program. And in doing so, they pushed to say, we want this to sort of lead to improved research.

And then, based on the experience of this really positive, and it was in the West African region, research methods training, the program decided to create this research method support for all grantees. And that has now been part of the program for almost 20 years.

And so this is something where I believe, and I’ve been privileged to be part of that for over a decade and I’ve been privileged as part of my role in that, to be part of the leadership team of the [00:13:00] research program for quite a number of years now. That interaction of having research methods support not just for the researchers on the ground, but for the program as a whole.

And it being the same people going from the individual researchers involved in specific grants to supporting the program itself has meant that I found myself in this incredibly privileged position, often, of being a bridge builder where we’re part of the understanding and building understanding of what’s happening on the ground into the leadership space, and from the leadership space back onto the ground, supporting the cohesion of the program.

Lucie: That’s a different aspect of research methods support, which we don’t talk about perhaps enough. Because it is meant to be a community of [00:14:00] practice, it is meant to be a program, a cohesive whole. And I think quite a lot of the leadership only work part-time on the project too. So they don’t have enough time to manage 20 and now 30 grants, and to be really aware of what’s happening in each, and to have those insights of how the research is actually happening. 

David: I would argue the regional team, which you mentioned is another part of the bridge building. 

Lucie: Ah, you were talking about the Leadership. 

David: The leadership team being the leadership team of the program. But you are right, I wasn’t clear on this because this is unique to this program. This program has global leadership, it has, if you want, these regional teams, and it has then the individual grantees who are doing the research on different things.

We are in this privileged role where actually we are involved at all of those levels. So it isn’t just at the leadership and at the ground level, it’s also in this intermediate regional level. And I would [00:15:00] argue that my role as a bridge builder is as part of the regional team. I’m certainly not doing it outside of that regional team role, but I have a role in the regional team. So we are discussing and we have direct interactions as part of the bridge building into the leadership team.

But this is where the fact that as the person giving research methods support I’m part of that sort of cohesion is really rare. Normally, the research methods support is something, well, okay, go and talk to the statistician, you need help. But that’s not how this is, our role is not just statistics, this is where as an anthropologist, if we were only saying this was about statistics, you would be getting annoyed at me. So I would be careful about that.

But it is this sort of data, different types of data and being able to support the research and the research methods, be they qualitative or quantitative or an interesting mix of both, which is what’s normally needed, [00:16:00] and being able to think of that in the context of what the individual researchers are doing as part of their projects and as part of what the leadership of the program are heading towards.

Lucie: Yeah.

David: And maybe I’ll just say the last thing that I really wanted to just bring up as part of this is that to me, the other thing which makes the West African community of practice so special is that the longevity of the engagement of many of the partners, that it has been a slow and steady approach, there’s been elements of capacity building. We have projects that we’ve talked to and talked with on previous episodes such as Boaua’s, what is now Sahel IPM, and used to be GMEM, where he talked about how he’s used this long history to basically transform [00:17:00] entomology in the Sahel because he’s trained so many students through it who are now engaged in Niger, Burkina Mali, and building up their own groups, and real institutionalization of the entomological approaches that they’ve been putting forward.

It’s incredibly powerful. And that comes, I believe, from the longevity, not just of the program as a whole, but of the patient approach the regional team has taken to build the community and focus on the community more than just the individual research programs.

Lucie: I would love to reflect on that, I guess the difference, a lot of funders, they focus much more on individual projects or supporting that individual project, do what it wants to do, instead of that focus on the community, as you say. 

David: And I think there is space and there is need for both. But I would argue that [00:18:00] in the space of research that’s happening at the moment, what’s happening in this community practice is underrepresented more generally. And I think there should and there could be value in there being more of this globally where you have this coherent approach to long-term building local research capacity, building up programs which bring together international, with local programs and creating those interfaces between them and taking a patient approach to build up that community. 

It is leading to not just individual research outcomes, we have, as I mentioned, some of the cases of that. But I would argue it’s leading to learnings which are beyond the research outcomes, which I hope part of our research method series on this would bring out some of our learnings. And that’s where the series you’ve got, or you are [00:19:00] starting, is I hope going to be so, well, informative in terms of drawing out this history and what better time than to draw out this history for the 20th anniversary.

Lucie: Absolutely. Thank you so much, David. It’s been wonderful to introduce this new podcast series, no, series within the podcast.

David: Who knows? Maybe we’ll release it separately as its own series one day. Initially, these are just a series of episodes within the IDEMS podcast, and it’s an important part of our work. I think I’ve mentioned in the past how influential this particular piece of work has been on IDEMS. Everything from the company principles, which has come from our experience of seeing principle focused evaluation used so well within this program, to almost all of our monitoring and evaluation.

We did an episode a [00:20:00] long time ago now, we sort of highlighted the different things that we try to use as part of our monitoring and evaluation, all of which have come from my interactions with this program, and many other influencers.

Yeah, really excited to have this as such a substantial part of our podcast.

Lucie: Thank you, David.