local knowledge
A mountainous area of northern Tigray, occupied two years ago by Eritrea and recently regained by Ethiopia, has been called a 'worthless piece of land' by war reporters, but it is worth a lot to the Irob who call it home. Here, the Irob laboured for years to add value to their land through their own initiative. One of these people is Yohannes Tesfay, a farmer who was so innovative in using...
Climate change may pose risks and/or create opportunities for development efforts in many countries. The USAID Global Climate Change Team developed this Adaptation Guidance Manual to assist Missions and other partners to understand how climate change may affect their project outcomes and identify adaptation options to integrate into the design for more resilient projects.
In developing...
In 1989, Intermediate Technology started to train groups of women potters in West Kenya to produce and market an improved cooking stove. The stove, known as Upesi or Maendeleo, is designed to burn wood and agricultural waste such as maize cobs and stalks. The improved cooking stove uses less fuel than the traditional three-stone fire. It produces less smoke and is safer for both the cooks and...
Dyeing is an ancient art which predates written records. It was practised during the Bronze age in Europe. Primitive dyeing techniques included sticking plants to fabric or rubbing crushed pigments into cloth. The methods became more sophisticated with time and techniques using natural dyes from crushed fruits, berries and other plants, which were boiled into the fabric and gave light and...
Climate change may pose risks and/or create opportunities for development efforts in many countries. The USAID Global Climate Change Team developed this Adaptation Guidance Manual to assist Missions and other partners to understand how climate change may affect their project outcomes and identify adaptation options to integrate into the design for more resilient projects.
In developing...
This article looks at the process of ‘making sense of the information’. While it is easy to generate much interesting and unusual information through participatory processes, it is often very difficult to make sense of the mountain of ‘data’. Where does participation in analysis begin and end? When does it happen, and how and by whom is local learning represented?...
The agricultural landscape in the highlands of eastern Africa is characterised by increasing fragmentation and serious degradation mainly due to high population pressure and limited use of available technological innovations. Participatory natural resource management (NRM) action research by the African Highlands Initiative (AHI) for the past 12 years has shown that an important reason for...
Participatory conservation efforts are now common throughout regions of high biodiversity in the developing world. Standard approaches to participatory conservation begin with need-based assessments that identify human induced ecological threats and livelihood deficiencies, but this focus on “threats” and “needs” tends to reinforce perceptions of rural people as...
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