Short Abstract

Supporting farmers in low and low-middle income countries to transition to agroecological practices can help increasing ability to adapt to climate change and improve their livelihoods/income. We will share different experiences from research and use in practice as implementing organisations of TAPE

Description

The effects of climate change are posing a growing threat to livelihoods and food security for farmers in low and low-middle income countries, which are recording decreasing yields due to the impact of droughts and floods (Gebre GG et al., 2023; Kalele, D. et al, 2021). These vulnerabilities are further compounded by conventional farming practices, such as intensive tillage and reliance on synthetic inputs, which degrade soil health and reduce resilience to climate stresses.

Supporting farmers to transition to agroecology can increase their ability to adapt to changing climate conditions (Snapp et al, 2021) and have a positive impact on livelihoods and income (Lucantoni and Domarle, 2023; Wordofa et al, 2024).

The FAO has developed, together with other organisations, the Tool for Agroecology Performance Evaluation (TAPE) to support farmers and implementing organisations to assess the multidimensional aspects of the transitions to agroecology.

In this talk we will share different perspectives and experiences in using TAPE as a tool to both support and influence project delivery.

UN FAO’s Agroecology Specialist, Dr. Yodit Kebede, will present examples of how TAPE has influenced practice, programming, and policy, including insights from the ongoing deployment of the Kenya TAPE National, which is contributing to the Monitoring and Evaluation framework of Kenya’s National Agroecology Strategy for Food System Transformation.

Hand in Hand International’s MEL Advisor, Laura Maio, will present how the organisation has applied TAPE in three projects in Kenya and the steps taken to operationalise one of its key tools, the Characterisation of Agroecological Transitions (CAET – TAPE Step 1), to better support project staff in gathering and understanding changes occurring on project farms and communities.

Stats4SD’s Senior Data Engineer, Dave Mills, will share his experience supporting the Measuring Agroecology and its Performance (MAP) project, a collaborative initiative of the Agroecology TPP, which applied TAPE in four African countries to generate evidence of agroecology’s contribution to societal goals. . The project, funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), focused on exploring the contribution of their global program “ProSoil” to agroecological transitions in Benin, Ethiopia, Kenya and Madagascar. Stats4SD helped contextualise and adapt TAPE for each country, developed an extra soil health module to enable collection of soil samples from the surveyed farms, and supported the data collection and analysis

The session will also explore the challenges faced in performing evaluations in multiple contexts and with multiple goals. TAPE as a tool is deliberately designed to work globally and provide comparable results regardless of where or when it is implemented. We will discuss how it achieves this to an extent, what the challenges are when comparing results from very different contexts, and when you as an evaluator might consider modifications to the tool to meet specific goals.

Members of the audience will be invited to share their own experiences with measuring agroecological transitions, followed by a Q&A session.