Rural Poverty and Environment (RPE) Programme - West Africa

RPE’s approach combines participatory research with capacity development (to enhance the skills of researchers and to strengthen the participation of decision-makers in multistakeholder processes), and with policy engagement (to build action and learning-oriented partnerships). The thought is that effectively addressing the interlinked challenges of poverty alleviation, food security, and environmental sustainability means working actively with many social actors, from farmers to researchers to government officials - in the following areas:

1. Crafting multistakeholder approaches in environmental governance - ensuring that stakeholders, including marginalised groups, participate in environmental and NRM decisionmaking, and that the resulting policies are informed by field research and stakeholder needs.
2. Enhancing access and rights to use natural resources - understanding legal frameworks and traditional systems. (RPE is also based on the idea that women's access to land, community forest rights, and the equitable use of genetic resources can be strengthened through rigourous interdisciplinary research.)
3. Strengthening integration with economic and social systems - fostering an understanding on the part of rural community members of urbanising, regionalising, and globalising forces, and their impacts.
4. Developing social learning for adaptation - supporting action-oriented experimentation with practices and tools, organisational or institutional changes, and policy development.

Specifically, RPE's methodology involves conducting a feasibility study in the field, identifying partners prepared to invest in the research, analysing the central themes to be covered, and developing a participatory action-research project to test approaches and strategies. The purpose of the research is to:

• build communication teams including representatives from a farmers' organisation, a local media organisation, and a local development organisation;
• reinforce their capacities in terms of communication;
• facilitate discussions in the participant communities on NRM problems and solutions;
• foster the exchange of knowledge to support the implementation of a solution;
• support the initiative; and
• make other communities aware of the initiative.

Agriculture, Environment, Health, Nutrition, Economic Development.

One of the central issues of sustainable development involves finding ways for local communities to manage their soil and drinking water resources so as to improve their nutrition and health and ensure proper management of their environment on a sustainable basis. In Africa particularly, soil degradation and lack of access to safe drinking water pose a significant obstacle to local development. Access to these resources is in turn influenced by many factors involving demographics, the natural environment, community organisation, public policies, and the political system as a whole, as well as market conditions, gender equity, education, technology, and democracy. Community participation in the discussion of these issues and in decisions regarding resource management is an essential element in the development process.

IDRC funds research that is geared to alleviating poverty and promoting sustainable and equitable development. It supports scientists and researchers in the South. Three broad areas define the scope of IDRC's programming. They are:

• Social and economic equity;
• targeting poverty and economic vulnerability; and
• environment and natural resource management.

RPE was organised in response to the fact that, in Africa and the Middle East, soil and water resources endowment are extremely limited, and yet they are being rapidly depleted and degraded (partly by human activities). It is mainly marginalised people, especially women, who bear the brunt of this resource depletion. On a global basis, per capita food availability is lowest in this region, and per capita food production has consistently declined over the last ten years. According to the World Resources Institute, all of the countries in North Africa and most of those in the Middle East are water stressed.

Information from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the International Institute of Irrigation Management indicates that, globally, the gap between potential and actual water use for irrigation is greatest in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Eighty-five percent of potentially available water remains untapped, and the cost of irrigation in SSA is three times higher than in Asia.

Given the weak state of national economies in the region, importation has not provided a viable alternative for tackling such a large food and water deficit problem. Most analysts agree that widespread land degradation and inefficient or inequitable use of water lie at the root of the problem. It is equally clear that increased food and water security through equitable, productive, and sustainable utilisation of land and water resources would provide a measure of relief, increasing the well-being of the poor and marginalised in the region. This is the targeted development challenge of Managing Natural Resources in Africa and Middle East (MNR-AME) initiative programme. MNR-AME insists that funded research projects recognise and address the human dimension of land and water management. To accommodate this dimension, researchers analyse how various groups of men and women are differentially affected by NRM approaches, determining how to help these groups benefit from the proposed solutions. MNR-AME puts a premium on research activities that target marginalised people by striving to:

• encourage researchers to pay particular attention to gender analysis;
• include gender specialists in research teams;
• welcome projects that, when appropriate, specifically address gender issues in the context of overall goal and objectives; and
• suggest that, as appropriate, gender considerations feature prominently in the definition of research design.

MNR-AME uses a variety of approaches to build research capacity, including workshops and conferences, short-term non-degree and graduate training programmes, internships, information sharing, and linkages and exchanges between strong and weaker researchers and institutions. MNR-AME also supports capacity building of community-based organisations such as women's groups and local NGOs.