Community visioning and action planning: guidelines for integrating the options by context approach

The Drylands Development Programme (DRYDEV) is an integrated programme designed to improve livelihoods and landscapes in semiarid areas of selected countries in the Sahel and Horn of Africa. It is a fiveyear initiative (August 2013 to July 2018) that aims to support smallholder farmers in selected dryland areas of Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mali and Niger with contextuallyappropriate interventions. Thus, the programme strives to support farmers to pursue options that are informed by the realities of the local context and their own priorities. To fulfil this objective there is need to establish an optimal balance between expert knowledge and farmer priorities. The identification and implementation of appropriate interventions in any particular community presupposes the involvement of the local people. Equally important are the principles of inclusiveness and bottom-up processes. Hence, the programme facilitates community level visioning and action planning involving all the different categories of farmers as a way of identifying options/ interventions and learning priorities. In addition, the initiative has adopted a co-learning paradigm, using participatory processes to select, refine and review the contextual appropriateness and performance of various options. This means that the identified options might not be the best fit in the beginning of implementation, but could be refined and adapted or dropped as understanding of the local context increases.

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