From Degretation to Innovation: The Effect of Support and Funding on Promoting Local Innovation in Kikandwa Environmental Association, Uganda

Type Thesis or Dissertation - Master Thesis
Title From Degretation to Innovation: The Effect of Support and Funding on Promoting Local Innovation in Kikandwa Environmental Association, Uganda
Author(s)
Publication (Day/Month/Year) 2008
URL http://www.prolinnova.net/~prolin/sites/default/files/documents/resources/publications/2008/final_th​esis.pdf
Abstract
Since the 1990s the interest in farmers’ local innovation in land management has increased. This process is marked by the evolution of various programmes that try to stimulate local innovation. PROLINNOVA is one of those programmes. Uganda is amongst the countries in which PROLINNOVA operates to stimulate local innovation in ecologically oriented agriculture and natural resource management. In this country KEA (Kikandwa Environmental Association) is one of the organisations that has received funding and support from the programme. This thesis analyses the effects of this assistance on the up-scaling of and/or improvement in local innovation in KEA. KEA has received USh 2,000,000 (Euro 800) of funding in the form of a LISF (Local Innovation Support Fund), to stimulate local innovation by aiming to achieve more participation by the farmers in research and development processes, and to give farmers the lead in defining and implementing activities. The funding is distributed among nine women, eight men, and two organisations that are innovating and that are members of KEA. Upscaling of local innovation is present in different ways. There is quantitative up-scaling in the sense of an expansion in the number of innovators and the membership base of KEA. Functional up-scaling has been stimulated as well; a new group activity is now running, and with the higher number of innovators, the type and number of individual innovations has increased. Information about these innovations has been spread by 95% of the nineteen innovators, stimulating the adoption of these practices. However, in general this has not resulted in new practices or innovations. The people that are most active in daily life, that try to improve their livelihood themselves and that experiment and educate themselves, are the ones that spread the knowledge needed to actually copy the innovation, and they did this to a large number of people. Regarding improving local innovation, most people, 95%, have used LISF to buy better equipment for their innovation in order to get quick and visible benefits of the money.

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