Separating Action from Impact in Rural Ghana

Canadian Water Network, Spring 2006
By Robin Farnworth

Ten Ghanaian men, one Canadian girl, one flipchart, and a small table covered in paper, candies and pens, all under the shade of a mango tree. This is a picture of the workshops I facilitated in Yendi District in the past month. After lunch, include three or four chickens pecking at the stray grains of rice in the middle of the circle of chairs, along with the occasional brave young goat who risks kicks to snatch up some goodie. Not only was the setting different from what you might expect of a workshop in Canada, so was the remarkable good nature of the (over-worked and underpaid) civil servant participants and the very positive feedback for the workshops.

Running workshops on improved adult education, training planning and evaluating with the Agriculture Extension Agents (AEAs) is one aspect of the project I am working on in Northern Ghana with the Ministry of Food and Agriculture. When Engineers Without Borders (EWB) sent me here to "use technology to drive change," I really had to use my own initiative to find what that change might be.

My project covers three areas of impact in one of the 18 Districts in the region. In the summertime, 10 other Canadian university students with EWB will repeat the project using my lessons learned in 10 other Districts. Slowly, we hope to see an increase in the organizational and technical capacity of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture, the frontline workers with Ghana's rural poor.

Now, you may be asking yourself, what does holding workshops on adult education have to do with technology? How is this going to help rural farmers use technology to increase their yields? What does an Engineering Physics grad know about pedagogy? I thought engineers built bridges and worked on irrigation dams and stuff?

Very true. The connection between irrigation and teaching extension agents how to teach rural Ghanaian farmers is not immediately obvious. But it turns out the key to getting technology to farmers is not in the technology itself. There are very good, efficient and appropriate technologies, like the foot operated treadle pump, that exist but aren't being adopted. The treadle pump could have a massive impact for yields in both the dry season and in droughts during the rainy season, since most farmers rely on the rains for irrigation. So why aren't farmers adopting this and other technologies that will increase their yield and make a real difference in the household income?

The answer to that question is very complex. Part of the problem is that the farmers just aren't learning about the new technologies. That is where the AEAs effectiveness comes in. While the AEAs are amazing technical people, the education and training they receive on how to teach adults is limited, or in some cases, non-existent. So the message about treadle pumps and other technologies is not delivered as well as it could be.

And what do I know about teaching adults? More than I thought I did! The education system in Ghana is very much a "teacher talks, students listen" set-up. For formal education, this works well enough, but when it comes to teaching adults, more participatory techniques are needed. This is the style of teaching that is more popular in Canada. I have taken my experience as a participant and leader in workshops and other informal learning environments back home, enhanced it with a lot of research, and packaged it into a series of workshops for AEAs.

The objectives of the workshops were to not only help AEAs learn about adult education techniques, but also to get them thinking about how to plan training, and more importantly, how to evaluate it. Here I emphasized the difference between activities, and the results of those activities, or the overall impact. Until recently, the "job" was considered done when the activity was finished. For example, if the AEA was doing training on supplementary feeding and watering of sheep and goats in the dry season the training was considered a success if the target number of participating farmers turned up. It didn't matter if they slept through the training or if they went home and continued to let their animals rummage all season.

My task is to get the AEAs thinking not only how they can best teach the participants about the topic, but also to consider the job done when there are results, or changes in the farmers' practices, because of the training. For years AEAs have been doing activities, but no one has really formally considered the results, or the impact of these activities!

The result that I hope to see, because of my activities, is the delivery of technology and best practices to farmers is done effectively, and that impacts are considered more important than activities. To set an example, that means that in my own workshops, I was using as many participatory techniques as I could, that I considered the needs of adult learners, that I taught to as many different learning styles as possible, that I included energizers, icebreakers and hands-on activities, and that I set the stage to monitor the impact of the workshops. The participation level was very high, as was the amount of laughing, sharing, and, most importantly, learning.

The potential impact of the workshops is enormous. If the AEAs are delivering their messages more effectively, more farmers will adopt the technologies. Also, the AEAs will be looking for results to see if the technologies are being adopted or not. If they are not, changes can then be made.

An example where this could make a difference is in land and water management. Most farmers in the northern region rely on rain as their only source of irrigation. To make best use of the rain, farmers are encouraged to make ridges along the contours of the fields to keep the water next to the plants, and to keep the top soil from being washed away. But finding the contours is not always a simple task. Every year, AEAs hold trainings on constructing and using A-frames to find the contour lines. Every year, farmers who have been "trained" are either not practicing what they learned at all, or trying, but failing, to find the contours. The water continues to wash away the soil and nutrients, leaving the crops high and dry.

The activity was being accomplished, but the impact was very low. If the AEAs use a more hands-on, participatory approach to teaching them how to find contours, and then follow-up to see if the farmers are practicing it, there is a better chance the activity will be a success. And by considering the impact rather than the activity, if it isn't a success, appropriate action can be taken to solve problems for the next year.

With the workshops completed, I am in my own monitoring stage. Did the lessons I presented stick? Was there buy-in to the ideas on impact versus activities? And ultimately, will there be any change in the AEAs practices or attitude resulting from the workshops? Will the adoption rate of technologies like the treadle pump go up? When these questions can be answered, I'll be able to tell if my work here has been accomplished or not. The activity is over, but the results aren't yet in.

-The Canadian Water Network (CWN) is supporting Robin's work in Ghana and will be publishing three articles by Robin written throughout her placement. EWB would like to thank the CWN for their continued support.