Theme: Capacity development

On 28 January, Roberto La Rovere, CIMMYT Impact Specialist, launched two new tools recently developed by CIMMYT’s ITAU “Operational guidelines for assessing impacts of agricultural research on livelihooods”, and the “Manual to conduct socioeconomic surveys through Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs)”, with participants from various CGIAR centers, during a session themed “Tools to capture impacts of our work on livelihoods,” organized by CIMMYT Kenya at the ICRAF campus in Nairobi.

Impact assessment (IA) is changing, with the focus shifting from calculating rates of return to measuring impacts on the livelihoods of those targeted by agricultural R&D projects. The Operational Guidelines, coauthored by La Rovere and John Dixon, are aimed at practitioners in impact assessment, particularly at managers who want to write IA projects or projects with an IA component, and at our partners in the field. The Guidelines provide a step-by-step guide on how to plan for and conduct an IA, considering aspects such as cost, capacity, and team composition, and indicators of how to measure impact. Participants held engaging discussions on how to attribute the roles of different partners, how to build IA into program design, and how to discern the effects of confounding factors in determining impact on livelihoods.

The second tool, the PDA Manual, jointly developed by La Rovere and Federico Carrion, guides users on the applications of these devices for collecting quality socio-economic data more quickly. The manual shows how to download the program and how to enter and analyze data, and provides sample surveys. The tool can also be used for agronomic or other types of surveys. The potential for using PDAs in various circumstances and types of surveys raised the interest of participants. Useful for quantitative surveys, the PDA has already been used in IA studies in multi-country surveys in Africa. Its advantages and disadvantages and areas of application were discussed in the seminar.

A similar seminar will be given at El Batán to launch the tools internally. The manuals are available on the CIMMYT website under the “Impacts and impact evaluation” sub-heading of the ITAU page, and users are encouraged to provide feedback for improving them.

On Friday 25 January, representatives from the Texcoco office of John Deere gave a demonstration at El Batán of mid-size tractors and other equipment for intermediate-scale farmers. The event was organized by the Mexico State Secretary of Agriculture and Livestock Development (SEDAGRO), with support from station superintendent Francisco Magallanes, and drew 50 participants.

From 28-30 January 2008, the Genration Challenge Programme (GCP) lived up to its middle name and organized a workshop on an intricate challenge— drought phenotyping. Held at CIMMYT’s El Batán facilities, the workshop brought together experts from diverse disciplines—crop physiologists, GIS specialists, model developers, to name several—to address more effectively the increasing phenotyping needs from genomic studies and breeding programs. During the workshop, several options for tackling the complexity of drought phenotyping in GCP projects were discussed, centering on:

• Improving environment characterization, based on GIS, water balance models, and their combination.
• Improving phenotypic data collection through better experimental designs, protocols, and data capture.
• Selecting potential hubs, based on climatic representativeness and existing facilities and expertise.
• Common activities were agreed upon by the participants, who developed a workplan to be further refined and implemented in the coming
  months.

The participants were: Gregory Edmeades (Consultant), Abraham Blum (Consultant), Glenn Hyman (CIAT, Colombia), Sam Geerts (Leuven University, Belgium), Robert Koebner (Consultant), Paul Brennan (Consultant), Reinaldo Gomide (EMBRAPA, Brazil), John O’Toole (Consultant), Guy Davenport (CIMMYT), Rosemary Shrestha (CIMMYT), Eduardo Hernández (CIMMYT), Humberto Gómez (GCP), Jean-Marcel Ribaut (GCP), and Philippe Monneveux (GCP).

During 21-25 January, 29 persons attended a course at El Batán on Fieldbook and MaizeFinder. Organized by Eduardo Hernández, of the CRIL, with support from Marianne Bänziger and Kevin Pixley, director and associate director of the Global Maize Program, the aim was to train maize workers in orderly data management. Fieldbook is an application used to prepare seed for trials, manage trial data, print labels, record data, manage breeding program inventories, conduct statistical analyses, and implement selection indexes.

Instructors were Fredy Salazar (CIMMYT-Colombia), Juan Carlos Alarcón, and Eduardo Hernández (CIMMYT-Mexico), who demonstrated the advantages and functionality of Fieldbook, a package developed by Bänziger and perfected by CIMMYT maize breeder, Bindiganavile S. Vivek. Participants included maize breeders and technicians, as well as others who might find the application useful. The course also covered MaizeFinder, a database that permits advanced searches for germplasm with particular traits of interest, and CropFinder, a prototype program that will allow the same functions for rice, wheat, and maize. Petr Kosina, Jennifer Jones, and Ricardo de la Rosa recorded the event on video for future training uses.

Participants were: Víctor Chávez, Luciano Juárez, Marcial Rivas, Martín Rodríguez, Simón Pastrana, Eva Huerta, Carlos Martínez, María Zaharieva, Martha Hernández, Natalia Palacios, Adolfo Basilio, Andrés Corona, José Luis Torres, Hilda Hernández, Fernando Juárez, Silverio Ávila, George Mahuku, Carlos Muñoz, Efrén Rodríguez, Daniel Fernández, Gerónimo Ortega, Israel Sánchez, Manuel Lorenzo López, Mayolo Leyva, Ciro Sánchez, Óscar García, Sotero Rivas, Beatriz Morales, Silverio García y Mansir Yusuf.

Since 1966 and throughout its history, CIMMYT has sought to enhance the human resources available for agricultural research related to its own objectives. In doing so, CIMMYT has helped candidates study for professional qualifications or higher degrees at appropriate universities. The library at CIMMYT headquarters maintains a list of theses in which CIMMYT is named, and its support—either financial or through the use of its research resources—is recognized in the thesis itself or in a journal article based on the thesis. The list has 867 theses presented at 170 academic institutions, located in 44 countries, and represents the work of 795 scientists from 75 countries. (To see the list visit: http://staging.cimmyt.org/ libtools/thesis.htm.

During 7-11 January 2007, Jesper Norgaard of the IRRI-CIMMYT Crops Research Informatics Lab (CRIL) gave a course for Spanish-speaking CIMMYT staff on IWIS3, the latest version of the International Wheat Information System and on the related International Crop Information System (ICIS). The two systems integrate data on the geneologies, yields, general performance, and other traits of IRRI and CIMMYT mandate crops.

Participants: Hans Joachim Braun, Vicente Morales, Yann Manes, Martín Rodríguez, Karim Ammar, Leopoldo Arteaga, Luis Banderas, Etienne Duveiller, Nérida Lozano, Francisco López, Thomas Payne, Bibiana Espinosa, Sergio González, María Luisa Gómez, Eduardo Hernández, Juan Carlos Alarcón, Gary Atlin, Manuel López Nava, Mayolo Leyva, Susanne Dreisigacker, Efrén Rodríguez, Ismael Barrera, Gerónimo Ortega, Daniel Fernández, and Luis Banderas.

As part of its capacity building initiatives, CIMMYT conducts periodic in-country training for visiting senior scientists drawn from national research systems. Three such scientists – Luka Atwok, Kaka Meseka (both from Southern Sudan) and Mbuya Kankolongo (the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) – completed their six-month tour of duty at CIMMYT Kenya at the end of November. Their comprehensive training spanned an entire cropping season and they were taken through all aspects of a cropping system – planning, executing, data collection and analysis as well as reporting – within a breeding program. The breeding programs included those for Striga management, drought tolerance, insect resistance and improved protein quality in maize. The three were awarded their course completion certificates at a colorful and tasty lunch, hosted in their honor. They were grateful to CIMMYT for the opportunity to have participated in the training and were more confident of their capacity to lead their national breeding programs, once back in their respective countries.

During 20-21 November, 16 CIMMYT staff from diverse areas took time out from their busy year-end schedules to attend the workshop “Time Management and Organizing Skills,” offered by the company Performance Training Solutions. Comprising lectures, interactive discussions, and hands-on exercises, the workshop provided strategies, tools, and tips to help the participants get time on their side to improve the way they work and live. “You can’t manage or control time,” explained instructor Harry Peasley, “but you can manage yourself in relation to time, and control how you use it.” One key approach Peasley promotes is using a weekly calendar to order one’s work life. “A lot of effective time management consists of changing bad habits, which tend to be like a comfortable bed: easy to get into, but hard to get out of!”