Case Studies of Succesful Projects

Here's an interesting article found on the website of the International Development Research Centre (furthermore, you may find on the same website an article about sustainable agriculture). However, I will quote here only the most relevant sections:

"Employment in rural agribusiness

Rural people can be liberated from poverty when enabled to earn a stable income from sustained employment in agribusiness enterprises which, individually or collectively, they own and operate. Agribusiness includes production of crops and livestock; of materials essential to crop and livestock production; preservation and processing of agricultural, horticultural and livestock products; and safe delivery to identified markets. Sustained development of rural agribusiness requires:

1. 
   
   
   a comprehensive, critical assessment of resources available and resources needed to produce and deliver familiar, acceptable, affordable products to identified accessible markets;
2. 
   
   
   training to acquire relevant practical knowledge and skills;
3. 
   
   
   constant, consistent, reliable access to technical, financial and marketing advisory services;
4. 
   
   
   organisation into legally registered community cooperative associations administered by the community. A community cooperative organisation can exert greater influence than isolated individuals in gaining favourable access to loans, credit, bulk purchasing and markets; in providing essential supporting and advisory services;
5. 
   
   
   two highly successful programmes in south India are exemplary.

The MSSRF Biovillages programme

In 1991, the M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF), based in Chennai, began its Biovillages programme for rural agribusiness development. The programme persuasively illustrates that, given the opportunity, with effective training and advisory services, poor rural women with little formal education can collectively and individually engage in sustainable agribusiness. MSSRF supports a national biovillage network, illustrated by the programme in Pondicherry. The Pondicherry programme is administered by a Biovillage Council of some 30 women representatives from 19 rural communities. A Biocentre is staffed by young trained advisers recruited from the biovillage communities who train, assist and provide an immediately accessible advisory service to the rural women, negotiating low interest loans and credit, providing veterinary and ancillary advisory services. Each village community is equipped with a computer linked to market outlets to provide instant access to current prices and levels of demand for products offered by the biovillages. Computer graphics and illustrations are useful tools for demonstration and training.

Pondicherry biovillage women cultivate horticultural crops, produce low-cost hybrid seed for more than a dozen vegetable species, organic fertilisers from vermiform compost, and bio-pesticides from Neem trees and other local resources. The women raise poultry, culture fresh water carp in village ponds, compound fodder for their cows. The Biovillage Centre maintains demonstration plots to ensure efficient crop cultivation and crop combinations that contain most nutrients essential to human health. The Biovillage Women's Council study opportunities for new and expanded activities, manage and monitor collective financial resources, and make bulk purchases at wholesale prices of essential supplies.

VGKK/KT-CFTRI health and employment programme

The Vivekananda Girijana Kalyana Kendra/Karuna Trust is an NGO registered in India that provides health care, basic education, vocational training, biodiversity conservation, stimulates community self-help and small-scale rural industries in the B. R. Hills/Yelandur taluks of Chamarajanagar district of Karnataka State. The forest reserve covers more than 350 square kilometres and is inhabited by some 80,000 people of the Soligas tribe whose ancestors have subsisted on the products of the forest for countless generations. Several years ago an eminent Indian physician abandoned his practice in Bangalore to provide much needed health care to the poor tribal forest people. At the outset, more than half the children suffered chronic malnutrition; infant mortality exceeded 150 per 1000 live births; leprosy, epilepsy, tuberculosis and diarrhoeal diseases were hyper-endemic. Assisted by other volunteer physicians and surgeons, the director provided a diversity of remedial and health care services. They established clinics for maternity, ante-and post-natal care, a surgery, ward residence facilities, a mobile surgery to visit remote communities, and trained young tribal women as nurses, midwives and medical assistants. By multi-antibiotic drugs and reconstructive surgery, the incidence of leprosy dropped from over 20 per cent to less than one per cent of the population. Comparable improvements occurred with other hyper-endemic diseases.

The need was evident for education, vocational training and employment to alleviate abject chronic poverty. Schools for primary, secondary education and vocational training were established. The physician director then requested assistance to promote rural agribusiness industries to harvest and process non-timber forest products (NTFP) and horticultural crops cultivated in forest clearings. Extracts of more than 60 identified natural medicinal plants have been registered as Ayurvedic drugs. Opportunities by which to expand from domestic to small commercial scale processing of fruits, vegetables, wild honey and medicinal plants from the forest were realised through a grant from a development agency and a loan from the local agricultural bank. Roughly 50 poor women were trained to operate and manage factory-scale processing technologies by which to transform various NTFP into marketable products, products familiar and readily acceptable to local people. The factory, with a working area of 220 square metres, is equipped for steam processing, fluid concentration, dehydration and simple fermentations. An ingenious evaporative cooling chamber preserves fresh and perishable biological materials.

The factory, constructed entirely of local materials by local labour, was completed in 45 days and began full-scale production in September 2004. Technologists from the Indian Central Food Technological Research Institute (CFTRI) at Mysore trained the women, gave guidance in product design, development and quality control, and continue as an accessible, reliable source of technical and marketing advice. The VGKK organisation is formally registered as a cooperative association and administers a credit union from which members can obtain loans or make interest-bearing deposits. In addition to the 50 women who manage and operate the factory, cultivation and harvesting of raw materials, marketing of processed products, provides employment for very many more. Among the tribal people, it is a self-imposed discipline that quantities of NTFP harvested never exceed the natural rate of regeneration. Thus it is a model of biodiversity conservation.
These two examples clearly illustrate that poor rural people who have little formal education can be trained to produce and process a wide diversity of biological materials, so long as they have constant and consistent access to technical, financial and marketing advisory services, services provided by intelligent young people indigenous to and therefore familiar with the language, culture and customs of the people to be assisted. They illustrate that rural poverty alleviation demands very many relatively small financial investments; that poverty alleviation is a labour-intensive not a capital-intensive undertaking, a lesson yet to be learned by many development agencies.

...

Local management of water

In the précis of his book Water; Local-level Management, David E. Brooks gives blunt advice: "There is one iron rule for managing groundwater and aquifer supplies: assume the worst". And then, from a man who has been in the forefront of this field heading an NGO (Friends of the Earth) and worked as a consultant before joining IDRC, Brooks adds more positively: "Policy and research should shift their focus from enlarging supplies of water to managing demand". On the question of engaging local communities, he says: "Policy-making should always start by accepting social customs and cultural norms as given, but not sacrosanct". Finally a warning: "Devolution of the power to manage water (not just read meters and fix leaks) will not come easily. The forces to maintain a top-down approach to water are well entrenched and serve many power elites".

His way of thinking has informed a wide range of water projects supported by IDRC, that have taken place at all levels from international to community. Internationally, the Centre has worked for a dozen years in the Middle East and North Africa region to promote water demand management (WDM) through gatherings of ministers and officials to exchange knowledge and experience among their nine regional countries. Missions between countries have shown, for example, the Syrian water officials how Water Users Associations (local bodies) in Tunisia distribute drinking water and levy charges, and how Egypt deals with wastewater.
These gatherings have evolved into a Water Demand Initiative, a five year-programme (2004–2009) with the awkward acronym WaDImena, to reach out further to civil society with research, and to apply WDM strategies in particular rural areas, concentrating on women and the rural poor. WaDImena has a website (www.idrc.ca/WaDImena) with a trilingual glossary of WDM terms and a library that highlights lessons learned.

But respect for traditional knowledge is a major factor in tackling water demand problems. Farmers in the stony highlands of Yemen depended for years on intricate terracing to save water, and conserve fertile soils from erosion. Researchers studying why these terraces were now in disrepair learnt the obvious answer: maintaining them was brutally hard labour, and many men had left for the cities. Also, there was no clear agreement on cost-sharing between landlords and tenants, and no credit available to farmers to invest in water management. Ways were found to rebuild at reasonable cost and labour, and food production became profitable and attractive again. A comment from David Brooks: "Reviving traditional water management approaches can require both technical and policy ingenuity, but the rewards can be significant".
China provides the most striking example of how a determined (and sometimes desperate) community can take on management of its water resources, and reverse the top-down process of regulation. Centralised state control enforced by a cumbersome bureaucracy has long been the pattern in China, and one recent result has been that the economic boom in its eastern provinces have brought little benefit to parts of the interior. In particular, the mountainous Guizhou province in the southwest has remained one of the poorest; and Changshun county, set on sloping land that is mainly porous limestone is chronically short of ground and subsurface water. Shortage of water has meant low rice yields, little diversification of crops and degraded forests. It has added to the burden of women who walk miles to collect water for households.
A first attempt at water management was made in the early 1990s when facilities were rebuilt and maintained by the state. But there was little accountability of this poorly managed government project, and no local control. Politely put, the project had limited effectiveness. At that point, researchers at the Guizhou Academy of Agricultural Sciences (GAAS), funded by IDRC, decided to try a community-based approach, involving participatory decision-making about natural resource management. In 1995 its team began learning about and analysing traditional practices in a number of villages, and measuring the damage already done to the natural resource base there. (It was the same diagnostic approach described in the case-study on Farming Systems Research).

The GAAS team guided the academics and local residents through a collaborative process. There was debate on practical and technical matters – irrigation, reservoirs, pipes, new water sources – and strong attention to the social aspects of development. But the overall emphasis was on the process and on involving people in decisions about their own development. It was painstaking and lengthy, but the process worked. The people selected the technical solutions, and built the water systems; they took 'ownership' by working out regulations and agreed payments for maintenance and by electing (and paying) a manager to run daily operations.
Results reported have been remarkable. Farmers diversified crops and enjoyed increased yields. They grew fruit trees and berry bushes on the marginal land. Women probably gained the most. Relieved of hours of water gathering (it was now piped, a tap to every 50 households), they took charge of a peach orchard, and marketed the fruit. They overruled the researchers, who had suggested chestnut trees; and they impressed the deputy governor of Guizhou province, who had expected the scheme to fail, and who later admitted his officials had not thought of the kinds of regulations and management systems the villages established.
The idea that local initiatives can solve local problems is gaining ground in China. David Brooks should have the last words: "Decision-makers too often dismiss small groups and small solutions. They make a big mistake"."