ILEIA, the Centre for Information on Low External Input and Sustainable Agriculture, has over the past 23 years contributed to the exchange of field based information about the experiences of small scale farmers trying to improve their production in an environmentally sound manner. One of the major difficulties related to this aim has been, and remains, the lack of documentation of practical field activities taking place at community level. If achievements, difficulties overcome and lessons learned are not documented in some form, it is very difficult to share them. It is probable therefore that a lot of interesting information that could contribute to the further development of knowledge on ecologically sound agriculture has been lost, is in a format or language that is not accessible to all, or has not been fully reflected upon and presented.
ILEIA has started a new documentation programme with two objectives. In the first place we want to facilitate the documentation of experiences. For this purpose we have developed and distributed a documentation manual. In the second place we are interested in analyzing different documentation processes to be able to draw lessons from them. We hope to encourage readers to describe and analyse their experiences, and thus benefit from the process. We will benefit from analyzing these documentation processes and we will publish the lessons learned.
This approach has already results: Many different efforts are currently being carried out to document LEISA experiences based on the methodology available through the website or/and the printed manual, complementing other documentation attemps.
A good example of the documentation process and the analysis of the process is the case of the Isangati Agricultural Development Organisation (IADO), a local NGO in the Mbeya district in south-west Tanzania.In 2006 IADO took part in the documentation workshop organized by VECO Tanzania and ILEIA. The result of this exercise was an article published in LEISA Magazine Vol 23 no 2 pg 12-13, June 2007. Farmers were involved in the documentation of their experiences with cloning resistant coffee plants, though the documentation was led by IADO.
ILEIA has started this specific programme for increasing the documentation of LEISA experiences and analysing the documentation processes in 2007. We plan to work through our partners to see where there are possibilities for collaboration with various organisations. We will consider documentation processes which are based on different methodologies, carried out in different countries and within different contexts. We expect farmers to be the key actors in each process, in the same way as in the analysis of each process. As more activities are carried out, validation and dissemination will increase. This will be done via the website, and published in the magazine.
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