The other day a colleague asked me to give a talk on “communication planning” for the benefit of his colleagues in a tree nursery project. I wasn’t too familiar with their project so I asked some key questions about it, such as:

• What are the goals of the project?
• What is the role of communication in the project?
• How will communication be used to help achieve project goals?
• Who are the stakeholders?
• What prior work has been done to understand the stakeholders?

To facilitate wide-scale adoption and achieve impact, an R&D project needs to address the following points before a communication strategy can be designed:

1. Brief description of the technology or recommended practices
2. Impact or change desired: (e.g., improve the quality of X of all _______ by 35%; change farmers’ beliefs in ________management by 30%)
3. Target audience: (e.g., 500 tree operators in ____ municipalities in _______ province adopting recommended practices ; 10,000 growers in _______ municipalities in ______ provinces can identify the characteristics of quality seedlings, demand quality seedlings, and grow such seedlings)
4. Variables to be monitored: (e.g., tree operators’ cultural management practices, etc. )
5. Methods to be used for each variable: (e.g., surveys of nursery operators and tree growers; focus group discussions; participant observation; assessments of attitudes)
6. Consequences of change: (e.g., nursery operators grow quality seedlings, tree growers can recognize quality seedlings, reduced or zero tree mortality rates, reduced expenditure for planting materials, higher income, policy support to facilitate wider adoption – policy makers pass an ordinance that will require nursery operators to follow quality assurance checks as a requirement for a business license, etc)
7. Change motivations: (e.g., save $$$; time; labor)

Stakeholder participation

The tree nursery project will have to take a few steps backward to do the following:

• better understand stakeholders or intended project beneficiaries — what are their practices, reasons for doing them, resistance points. For this, the field staff will need to spend more time to “hang out” with the operators and growers. The agricultural anthropologist, Jeffery Bentley, has a practical to-do list for “hanging out” which I will share with you in another post.
• create opportunities for nursery operators and tree growers to participate in defining the problem and finding the pathways to solve it.

ICRAF has carried out a farmer-led development and scaling up of tree-based options in Africa and it would be useful to learn from their experience.

Will appreciate your comments.