171 – Building a Local Research Methods Support Team

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. 

David: Hi, Lucie. We’re discussing these sorts of trainings that have been happening with our team in West Africa recently.

Lucie: Yeah, so I’ve been really pleased to see how the team has been developing. And I’ve been equally pleased to see how the researchers we support in West Africa have been making the most of our locally based team and in requesting trainings for their own teams, for their own students.

So in the last few months we’ve had about one training every month in different countries. I think two in Burkina Faso, one in Mali, and on different topics, from data analysis to making maps, to collecting data with Open Data Kit, [00:01:00] ODK, to even office tools, the Google Suite, online meetings, using AI responsibly. So all sorts of different topics, and there’s been a lot of new advancements like that within our team, which has been really interesting to see. 

David: Our role as Research Methods Support has always been to not just say what the support should be, but to respond to the requests from partners. And as you mentioned the two in Mali I think are interesting ’cause they were quite different. There was the first one was an institution level on data, and that was really our wheelhouse if you want.

But it was something where it was quite a big deal because the organisation who requested it has a lot of data and are involved in a lot of different projects. So as well as supporting the projects that are part of the Global Collaboration for Resilient Food Systems, it was also about supporting the institution as a whole.

Lucie: So it’s a big [00:02:00] NGO. So they had lots of data, and it’s not necessarily complicated data, but it’s just in large quantities and a lot of their staff don’t have the experience or expertise to know what to do with the data. 

David: All data is complicated, there are always complications. And so this is one where we actually brought, the sort of most senior member of our local team came from Niger to Mali to support the Mali team on that.

Lucie: Because also the Mali team are very junior.

David: Yes.

Lucie: They’re the youngest members of the team.

David: Yeah. They have been with us for the least time, whereas our more experienced members have been with us now for a couple of years. But the second training they did on their own, the one which was much more on the office skills and on responsible use of AI. We created digital resources, we shared them, all of these trainings have had Moodle sites associated to them.

Lucie: Which the team have also been helping develop [00:03:00] themselves, which is really exciting.

David: Yes. And taking responsibility for that, which is exactly what we are hoping. The aim is to get them skilled up to be able to do the whole spectrum of this support, from understanding, identifying the needs, through to preparing the resources or putting together resources and putting them into a coherent form, which can be used for the training, delivering the training, and most recently reporting on the training.

Lucie: Yeah, so initially I think a few years back we were very much developing the team at the same time, and so the main emphasis was just on actually giving trainings. But now we are all getting more experience in that, it’s becoming really important to know how to write up and share this information, both in terms of, I think the team’s own reflections of how the workshop went, but also sharing that information not only with ourselves who weren’t there, but with other members of [00:04:00] this community of practice that is the Collaboration for Resilient Food Systems, to reflect on, yeah, how people are learning, what difficulties, what challenges people are having, whether it’s with data analysis concepts, whether it’s just with office tools.

So I think these reports have a lot of learning potential, but, I think we’ve already discussed a tiny bit, the idea of a learning report as opposed to an information report perhaps, I don’t know what to call them. The sort of learning reports that we are interested in is quite a new idea for a lot of the team.

David: And this sort of self-critical reflection, but this ability to be really not just saying what was done and saying it was done, that’s not what’s important. What’s important is what we learned from what was done. What is there that we can take? How can we improve? How can we forward? What needs to happen next? That reflective process is key.

Lucie: And so we are already seeing, I’m already seeing a difference a bit in the reports, where we are going from what is basically a long form [00:05:00] of a agenda to say we did this into more of a descriptive this is how we did it, this is how participants responded, and these are my reflections from that process.

David: Brilliant. Huge credit to you for actually putting the structures in place to help take the team remotely on this journey. This is not easy working conditions.

Lucie: It’s a very interesting learning process for myself too. Something I’m aware of is there’s like a miscommunication between me and the team in terms of when you write comments on a document, how are those interpreted? So to me, in my education, if someone writes comments, it means, it’s a suggestion for how to improve the document. I don’t necessarily need someone to tell me this is how you need to improve the document and then explain what they need to do.

So when I write questions next to the document, often I get a reply in the comments and no other action. [00:06:00] So I then need to be clear. Okay, so that’s good to know and I think it’s important that you write that in the document, there needs to be that added step, or I need to now formulate how to write comments so that it is understood that this is a direct suggestion for how the report can be improved.

David: But these are soft skills, which some of us take for granted.

Lucie: Exactly. To me it just seems obvious, but clearly it isn’t. And so I think I need to also change in how I communicate so that it is clearer.

David: And there’s elements of give and take on this. There’s also that that patient of being able to sort of recognise that if that’s how it’s interpreted now, once these iterations happen, the progress is seen. And I think one of the things which I’m finding so exciting about the way the team is growing is just how appreciated they are in these events.

Lucie: [00:07:00] Exactly, this is what’s so exciting to see that the researchers are aware, the other researchers are aware that the team is a resource that they can be present, they can give effective trainings, they can support them where they don’t have the capacity in terms of literal time, often, to support their own students.

The researchers we work with are aware that their students don’t have all of the capacities, they don’t have all of the skills that they need for their own research, but they themselves don’t have the time to give those trainings. 

David: Yeah. And this is where there are elements that we are able to bring in where in many of these trainings, researchers have been present. And that balance of being able to have components where you are taking the local students from where they’re starting, but also having components which the researchers are finding useful.

And that balancing between those two has been great to see how well that’s been navigated in a number of cases.

Lucie: That especially happened in one of the trainings in Burkina Faso, I think.

David: That’s right. And [00:08:00] basically there is my understanding what was really great about that workshop was that the researchers who organised it were then present, and they really felt that they gained from it as well. And that was actually one of the ones which the most work went in to prepare. But it worked really well.

Lucie: Can I correct you there? The most work on your side. I think the training that Issouf gave last week, three of the team, they were full-time all week, creating the guides, revising the guides, improving them. 

David: Okay. So I’m really glad you’ve corrected me because that didn’t happen in advance of the one that we did together. But that was again part of their learning, that when I got involved, and it was just before the deadline and really got stuck into doing this, they saw that that was needed, and so it is really great to hear that now actually they have the capacity to recognise what they need to do to [00:09:00] prepare.

So really good to hear that, that’s changed, and you are right, I was not involved at all, not really seeing that happening, which is great. And just to confirm, because last week was the preparation this week was when that was given. And that particular workshop, this was where we included elements of GIS and using QGIS to be able to build maps. 

Lucie: Which most students need to know how to do, because you always have, especially in agroecology, you always need to say where your field site is, where it is in the whole world you are working basically.

David: Exactly and being able to produce a nice map, even if it’s just a simple map showing the sites is so important. And this is something which we didn’t have prepared resources on this in the same way that we did for some of the other topics. And so to hear that they were able to now take that on, they’ve been involved in these things before, so they had some of the [00:10:00] skills, and there are resources out there that they were able to pull in and use. But still that ability, even just six months ago, I think our team would’ve struggled with that much more than they are now. 

Lucie: Definitely. Even the form that the guides are taking, you can see that they’re taking inspiration from the R-Instat guides that has been produced, a lot by the INNODEMS team I think?

David: Yeah, the team in Kenya, we’ve had some episodes with Zach who leads the INNODEMS team. And so that backwards and forwards now between East Africa and West Africa and the inspiration going one way and the other is really nice to see.

Lucie: Yeah. 

David: I wish we could get them to interact more. That’s still something which is on my agenda to actually figure out how we can get more visits or more collaboration to happen between the East Africa and West Africa team. 

Lucie: Through the mentoring scheme, we try to do it gently through the mentoring scheme. But I think it is hard, some other people are very busy at the moment, so it’s just hard in terms of schedules. 

David: But the [00:11:00] mentoring scheme has been extremely successful at creating some of those links. And it’s been great to see those connections building. It’s not the same as a face-to-face visit and actually something combined to work on together. That’s really where it would be great to get to.

Lucie: Coming back to the courses. I felt like I had a point about the difference of what happened and how it’s been evolving. Oh, yeah, that’s it. The team is now getting much more experience in terms of creating the resources. 

David: Yep.

Lucie: In terms of managing the eCampus, sort of Moodle site, as well as in creating. So we often have guides for people to help navigate and, you know, just as resources for people to go back to after the course has officially finished. But now we’re starting to have discussions also on basically the pedagogy of it, how to go from a very traditional, I’m gonna say, lecturer imparting information, to make it more active and participatory.

[00:12:00] So we’re starting off with how to do the introductions in a more participatory way. Because we’ve had discussions about how to include activities in the trainings, but I think that hasn’t, I think the team isn’t yet confident enough to actually lead activities in an as engaging way as I would like them to.

David: Yeah, and this is where we’ve been having these discussions since January in different ways because with the course in Mali, again, it started off as a very this is what we’re going to teach you. And it did end up very much with these are some questions and quizzes in the Moodle site that we will help you to do and to go through and to support you in using or in analysing your data or doing things with your data.

That shift, as you say, is one which takes time. And it’s great to see that it is something that on a pedagogical level people are engaging with.[00:13:00] 

Lucie: Well, and it is a big shift though, as you say. So I think it’s not only a shift for the facilitators themselves, the team in West Africa, but it’s also a shift for the participants of the trainings. So I think this is also why it’s gonna take a longer time for people to get accustomed to, because the facilitators themselves need to feel confident in the techniques to be able to, I think, deliver them to an audience who is used to a specific way of being taught.

David: Well, we’ve been giving trainings in the region for a long time, so I’m very conscious of that mindset. And it’s something where, as you say, the confidence to be able to push people out of their comfort zone and into that sort of active engagement is challenging. And it’s very easy to just stand with a PowerPoint and give a lecture. And if the audience is happy with it, then surely that’s what, you know, it’s easy, but it’s not effective. And this is what we [00:14:00] found. 

Lucie: Well, it’s well documented too that it’s not an effective sort of learning pedagogy or teaching method.

David: What I think is important is as we get others to do it, they have to have experienced it themselves, and they have now, they’ve been in enough workshops where we’ve been leading in certain ways, maybe not enough.

Lucie: Exactly, not enough. So what was interesting about our discussion about the, introductory presentations or like how members of a workshop introduce themselves, is that there they had or had experience of different ways. And we were able to draw on some of the community of practice when we have the big meetings where, you know, hundreds of participants.

And there we always have great ways of presenting ourselves. Batamaka, one of the regional leads, the way that he introduces each person individually, it communicates so much more than if each person individually presents themselves. And some of the team were able to remember last year, in 2024, where people, you know, broke up into different age groups and were able to talk [00:15:00] between themselves, and then share what each age group brings to the community of practice. 

And so, as a team, we were able to discuss different presentation techniques for different types of workshops, whether you know, what your aims are and whether the people know each other already.

And the team members, they had experience of these methods and they also knew, when asked to reflect about it, they knew what the value of it is for the workshop afterwards, how it can affect people, how people respond within the workshop and how people interact with each other.

David: Part of the process we’re trying to go through is experiential learning. So once they’ve had some of these experiences, being able to translate them into when they’re in that position of leading a workshop. 

Lucie: Being able to reflect on their experiences and see the value of it, before they translate it.

David: Yeah, brilliant, this is great.

I would like to come back to this sequence of workshops and the fact that the demand [00:16:00] is coming from the partners on the ground for this. There’s always been a demand for support, but we’ve never had the manpower to actually offer this support, as you’ve said, to the project students, to the institution students, to the partners. It’s really interesting to think how might we take this forward? Because the demands as they’re coming in now are, they’re really interesting.

Lucie: Yeah.

David: What would be amazing is to actually now think this through of how we can not only take the requests as individual initiatives as we’ve been doing, I think up to now, but start trying to put them together into a sort of, a set of choices that people could do. It’s always nice to develop something new and tailored to an individual group, but the importance of being able to replicate things that have [00:17:00] worked and to be able to have a suite of things where others could then choose and say, oh, they did that, I’d like that too, and to be able to offer that.

That’s where I think if we look at the year ahead or maybe the next couple of years, it’s quite interesting to then see where we can now say we’ve given this workshop, that workshop, you can have a tailored workshop or we could adapt something we’ve already given.

Lucie: Exactly.

David: And we’ve had that in the past, but they’ve been too far apart, because it’s always needed somebody from the outside to come in. Now we’ve got these local teams being built who can give them, this is really something that could just become a really regular part of our team’s work.

Lucie: And I’ve got to say, even one of the researchers, so in Mali, the second workshop, that was about a month ago, his recommendation at the end was that all of the other research projects have a training on this sort of responsible AI side and using office tools [00:18:00] effectively.

David: Yeah it’s something which I think we can, we need to document in a way that this becomes an easier thing for others to sign into.

Lucie: Exactly. And having a list of available courses as it were, makes it easier for other people to identify what is useful to them and what they could make the most out of. I think we’ve often seen when we ask people for what support they want, they tend to give the same sorts of responses because they’re used to what sort of support we give. And so they don’t always think about the other things.

David: Yeah, so having this sort of set of things, which are now there, which could be available…

Lucie: And being open to developing new ones and adapting, obviously the existing ones.

David: And so maybe the thing to finish with is to sort of reflect on, this has been a long time coming in different ways. We are very privileged to have the role we have as part of this bigger program and being able to [00:19:00] get to this point where, I guess there’s been three major steps which are worth mentioning, which have required the longevity.

First, there were a number of years where we were engaging directly with the projects to understand the needs, giving trainings ourselves. I went in regularly once a year for five, six years to give a training, and in each training there was something different we did, ODK was one, data visualisations, we did things related to QGIS and GIS in general.

So having those experiences of supporting in that context was one thing. Then having the opportunity to recruit and build the capacity of local counterparts and being able to sort of build them up and take them on. That’s taken a few years.[00:20:00] 

And then now getting to the stage where they can be playing that direct role on certain topics and taking over. And we’ve got the experience from our interactions that we can build on in many cases. And then we’re able to support them remotely to build courses which they can then deliver. But they can now deliver to a slightly different audience than we could reach otherwise.

And so that trajectory is one, which I’m really quite, well, I’m very grateful to the McKnight Foundation and to the Collaborative Crop Research Program, which became the Global Collaboration for Resilient Food Systems for providing this sort of, I believe, very important patient approach where there isn’t a single solution. It has been about recognising the needs of the moment, building on what has happened [00:21:00] and reflecting on what can be done better going forward.

And that ties in with the approach that you are now building into the team, that we are not seeing these as one-off. We are seeing these as building this reflection because we are asking ourselves how are we going to iteratively build with that patience of doing so. And it’s one of the only projects where we have the continuity to take that patient approach.

And I think that’s worth reflecting on that in so many other places, you’re supposed to come in with the solution when it’s not clear who’s ready for what solution and who’s providing the solution, as opposed to these iterative approaches where you are able to build capacity, understanding, and I think suitability is a key thing. I’m not saying that [00:22:00] the trainings I was giving when I started weren’t effective, but there was certain cases where they were not.

I reflected afterwards, not much of the audience was ready to learn to program in R, as an example. They wanted open source software, they wanted something which was freely available, so the obvious solution was to go in and try and teach them R. And on reflection, that was not the right approach. And we are now better at offering these things where there can be people in the audience who have those skills and who would learn to do something in R, but there are other routes available to people for whom that isn’t the right choice. And so actually in general, this idea of being software agnostic in everything we do is really critical.

Lucie: I think you also need to take credit though, for the idea and drive to see support as a locally based support as opposed to [00:23:00] an international occasional support.

David: Yeah, thank you. I have to recognise that COVID was part of that push. Before COVID, I wanted to build that local support, but we didn’t have the leeway, I think, to put as much emphasis on the local support, COVID then enabled us to prioritise it because we couldn’t go in, and so the only way to connect was to have local.

And I think that reflection or that observation that came from that adaptation of seeing that importance of the local then means that we have been able to continue to prioritise it. And that’s something which I think is opportunistic, reading the room, so to speak, not the room or the situation as it unfolded. But actually being able to recognise, and it’s not been easy [00:24:00] to build the local team in different ways. You’ve done an amazing job. There’s no way I could have done this. 

Lucie: It takes time and patience.

David: It takes time, patience, it takes a team.

Lucie: It takes good candidates as well. Yeah, exactly.

David: Yeah. And so I think this is something where, what we are now seeing is that there is also a big difference between having a team and a sense of a growing team and having individuals.

Lucie: Yeah. 

David: A few individuals is one thing. But they actually have an identity of their own and that they’re now building up the, their capacity and they’re able to engage in a different way and they’re pushing each other in ways where they’re now thinking how do we build the next generation? And so that responsibility is now passing on in ways which I hope is going to lead to momentum in all sorts of exciting ways. So let’s watch this space over the next couple of years.

Lucie: Yes, absolutely. [00:25:00] There’s exciting things to come.

David: Yeah. And thank you again for all your leadership of that process because it’s been great.

Lucie: With pleasure. Thanks, David.