Rodents have a significant impact on people’s livelihoods in many ways, causing damage to many different crops, contamination of stored food, damage to buildings and personal possessions and the transmission of 60+ diseases. Commonly recommended approaches for managing rodents using rodenticides are usually inappropriate for small-scale agricultural communities and have the potential to cause damage to human health and the environment. Innovative research and knowledge extension are required to tackle the rodent problems faced by African communities. As the main beneficiaries, small-scale farming communities will work together with agricultural researchers, NGOs, private sector and government policy makers and extensionists from six African countries to develop ecologically-based rodent management strategies that can significantly reduce the impact of rodents on people’s lives. Through STI on rodent ecology, training, networking and awareness raising, new innovations about rodent management will be developed and disseminated to end users and institutional stakeholder groups throughout Africa and worldwide.
The need for science and technology innovation in Africa with respect to rodent pest management is particularly important not only because of their relatively higher impact in the Tropics, but because there is a major disconnect between rodent research activities and priorities in developed and developing countries. In developed countries, rodent pest management research is driven by chemical companies looking for new rodenticides, but research is generally limited because rodent pests are not considered a big market or problem because people’s proximity to rodents is relatively low in developed countries. Whereas human proximity to rodents is high in Africa; most small holder farmers have high numbers of rodents in their houses and crop fields. Rodenticides and illegal poisons are not the solution for Africa because they are expensive and easily misused. However, novel and innovative research on rodent management is not really happening in Africa due to a lack of private companies and limited private sector rodent pest management services that typically drive R&D investment in places like Europe. This divergence between developed and developing countries with respect to rodent pests and their management means that Africa’s problems with rodents will not be resolved by knowledge transfer from Europe or North America where new appropriate solutions are simply not being developed. Africa must take charge of its own agenda and realise that appropriate solutions to its specific problems with rodents must be “home-grown”, therefore, building its own STI capacity among African universities, research institutes, civil society and the private sector.
The overall objectives of the action are to strengthen science, technology and innovation about rodent biology and management and contribute to African sustainable development by enabling institutions to address key indicators of poverty through the impacts of rodents on agricultural production systems and food security. Furthermore, the action will improve multi-stakeholder interactions to overcome bottlenecks in rodent pest management service provision and African-appropriate innovations that reduce the impact of rodents on peoples’ livelihoods. The action’s specific objectives are to build and strengthen Africa’s STI capacities across a range of specialities that will enhance socio-economic development by tackling policy issues, knowledge dissemination and technical competence to deliver sustainable rodent management. Africa’s capacities will be enhanced across a range of specialities related to ecologically-based rodent management including population dynamics, chemical ecology, animal behaviour, taxonomy, social anthropology, economics, agronomy, post-harvest storage & quality assurance, technology adoption, end-user participatory research, regulatory frameworks, and training and awareness programmes. As the project involves six African countries from the West, East and South, collaboration and cooperation at the inter-regional level will be enhanced. Rodents cause a number of pest problems across the value chain, reducing yields for all field crops and causing damage, loss and contamination during storage. Activities within the proposed action are designed to deal not only with agriculture and food security, but the holistic set of problems rodents cause, including human and livestock health and general well-being. The expected results of the action are to 1) identify STI priorities for rodent-related research and formulate policies that will improve rodent management and reduce the impact of rodents on food security; 2) develop national and international capacities to deliver, manage and monitor African-appropriate innovations for rodent management; 3) increase awareness among decision makers and the general public about the multiple impacts of rodents on people’s livelihoods in order to influence STI investment priorities. To achieve these three objectives, inter-linked activities are listed within work packages that contribute to an integrated strategy required to build STI capacity. WP1: Developing an African-appropriate response for rodent pest management problems WP2: Establishing a multi-stakeholder capacity building platform about African rodents WP3: StopRats training and awareness raising programme for the ACP region. WP4: Project management, monitoring & evaluation and communication / visibility. The StopRats action is proposed to take place over a 36 month period, creating a permanent legacy that includes an African centre of excellence, an interactive internet portal of information where knowledge and expertise can be shared, national level expert panels and advisory services that inform government and the general public, respectively, more capable and motivated education, research and extension staff and new national and international linkages among institutions that will improve the ability to innovate novel rodent research that can reduce the impact of rodents on African livelihoods.
http://www.npta.org.uk and http://www.bpca.org.uk, but with broader stakeholder input (including civil society, government research institutes) to support the relatively underdeveloped private sector on rodent pest management found across Africa. This Rodent Advisory Service marketplace is a highly innovatory approach to disseminating and amalgamating knowledge and could help establish national and regional mechanisms for advising public and private bodies, service providers and end users. We expect national level websites established in each involved country, initially supported by the StopRats action, but eventually the costs of maintaining the website will be met by subscription fees payable by service providers as occurs elsewhere.|
Work package title |
WP 1: Developing an African-appropriate response for rodent pest management problems |
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Lead partner |
UoVenda |
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Involved partners |
All partners – UoNamibia, Concern, UoSwaziland, Vahatra, SokoineUoA, ARC-PPRI, NRI-UoG |
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Objectives |
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Justification |
Rodents have a significant impact on people’s livelihoods in many ways, causing damage to many different crops, contamination of stored food, damage to buildings and personal possessions and the transmission of 60+ diseases. Despite being a well-recognised problem throughout the world, there has been relatively little research on rodent pest management since the advent of anticoagulant rodenticides in the 1950’s. Rodents have been ignored because of a lack of hard facts on their true impact. The poor application and adaptation of rodent control measures to particular situations often results in treatment failures, leading to apathy and widespread acceptance of rodent pests in the environment. Many African farmers suffer from low awareness, ingrained defeatism when trying to control rodents and acquiesce to rodent damage. Commonly recommended approaches for managing rodents using rodenticides are usually inappropriate for small-scale agricultural communities and have the potential to cause damage to human health and the environment. Building Africa’s research capacities to tackle rodent pest problems by developing innovative and sustainable science and technology solutions could be one of the most important interventions of the 21st century across the continent to reduce poverty and improve people’s livelihoods. This is because the multiple impacts of rodents on peoples’ lives place these animals in a relatively unique position compared to other pest and disease problems faced by agricultural communities. Therefore, reducing rodent pest numbers can have a much larger impact on reducing poverty than any other single pest problem. In agriculture, rodents are both a pre-harvest and post-harvest pest problem, causing major impacts on food security, nutrition and food safety. |
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Description of work |
StopRats stakeholder workshops. Partners in each country will carry out a stakeholder analysis to identify individuals, institutions and end users including community based organisations (CBOs) that are or should be involved in rodent research and development, regulation, and practical delivery of knowledge and rodent management services. A series of workshops will be held in each country inviting identified stakeholders to discuss the current neglect of rodent research and their inadequate management. Over the project action timeframe, at least 3-4 such meetings per country will be scheduled, anticipated to be 2-3 days duration with approximately 50 people each. These national level meetings will be structured to provide open discussion of the multiple problems rodents cause, e.g. their damage to field crops, loss/contamination of stored food, transmission of disease to livestock and people, destruction of personal property, as well as current management practices, e.g. use of illegal poisons and inappropriate/misuse of rodenticides, and alternatives that may/may not be locally available. We expect one of the outcomes of these workshops will be to offer support to the overall objectives of the StopRats action, sanctioning proposed activities as well as potentially adding/changing activities to some limited extent with respect to time and budgetary constraints of the action. A certain level of flexibility within the StopRats action will be required to ensure these national stakeholder groups can focus on the problems, which may vary between countries with different existing policies and/or levels of advancement in how rodent pests are managed or regulated. The workshops will, therefore, partially act as a project driving force, as a mechanism to debate the issues in the broadest sense, build consensus among stakeholders, and provide feedback to the other StopRats activities discussed and implemented in parallel. Each meeting will be minuted, key actions/outcomes summarised and made available to project partners via the project website. The full round of workshops across the countries involved will be analysed to form part of a policy paper published through peer-review journal mechanisms. In addition to national level workshops, we propose to organise 1-2 international workshops to provide higher level knowledge sharing and support as a means of ensuring best practice and learning that can be applied in each involved country. Socio-economic analysis of the impacts of rodents on African society. Because rodents have been neglected globally, there are many knowledge gaps, and coupled with generally poor networking opportunities among isolated rodent scientists, there are widespread problems in the amalgamation of knowledge, particularly related to understanding and quantifying their multiple impacts on people’s livelihoods. In the Tropics, rodents can vector/reservoir more than 60 different diseases to people and domestic animals (e.g. leptospirosis, plague typhus), attack nearly all crops (staples, vegetables, fruits) in the field and store as well as damage physical infrastructure (e.g. electrical wires), and personal possessions (e.g. clothes, blankets, mosquito nets). The wide variety of negative impacts presents major challenges in trying to quantify the socio-economic impact of rodents in different contexts/localities. Because such an analysis has never before been carried out and in order to strengthen STI about rodents, we propose to bring together the global published literature on the multi-sectoral damage caused by rodents and carry out a comparative analysis that economically quantifies rodent damage at the national level in each target country vs. expenditure on rodent management and R&D investment. Ultimately, we propose to compare this analysis to similar analyses that have been conducted for other crop and human/animal health pests (e.g. army worm, locust, quelea bird, stem borers, mosquito, tsetse fly) which have economic importance in Africa in order to understand current investment priorities and the potential benefits of investment in rodent biology and management. This socio-economic analysis will help synthesize existing knowledge that will improve our understanding of current problems and bottlenecks in delivery of rodent pest management options. Similarly, this activity will provide an opportunity to investigate knowledge, attitudes and practices about rodents with respect to a number of key parameters, such as the impact of increased climate variability on rodent population outbreaks, the differential roles and attitudes of men and women in rodent management, the environmental sustainability of various rodent control practices and the function of previous and present governance structures to inform future improvements. The involved partners, associates and StopRats stakeholder workshop participants will all be involved in the collection of published literature, internal documents and personal experiences to build up a database (held on the StopRats website described below) which will form the basis of a multi-authored peer-reviewed critical review as well as at least one other peer-reviewed paper in a journal such as Food Policy on the comparative socio-economic investment opportunities in rodent management vs. other common pests of the Tropics. Policies and priorities for rodent management. The analysis and publication of the proposed critical review and socio-economic analysis discussed above will provide ACP nations with a foundation on which to rationally re-evaluate R&D investments, knowledge extension and outreach programmes and start of process of policy development that focusses initially on developing priorities for rodent pest management. The multi-sectoral damage caused by rodents is likely to pose several policy challenges, e.g. roles and responsibilities of Ministries of Health, Agriculture and Environment are arranged in different ways in different countries, but often still mean that many rodent issues currently fall between Ministerial departments. To develop policies and resolve priorities, rodent pest issues require the establishment of national multi-disciplinary expert panels to develop recommendations. Project partners have good working relationships with government and it should be possible to establish such working groups with government approval, particularly if provided with policy documents and concrete evidence of rodent pest impacts. We expect that the StopRats stakeholder workshops will form the basis of development of these expert panels. |
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Deliverables |
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Risks & assumptions |
Minimise scheduling conflicts for workshop attendees by long-term forward planning of meetings Establishing government supported cross-departmental rodent expert panels may prove difficult in some countries |
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Work package title |
WP 2: Establishing a multi-stakeholder capacity building platform about African rodents |
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Lead partner |
SokoineUoA |
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Involved partners |
All partners – UoNamibia, Concern, UoSwaziland, UoVenda, Vahatra, ARC-PPRI, NRI-UoG |
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Objectives |
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Justification |
There is a major disconnect between rodent research activities and priorities in developed and developing countries. In developed countries, rodent pest management research is driven by chemical companies looking for new rodenticides, but research is generally limited because rodent pests are not considered a big market or problem because people’s proximity to rodents is limited in developed countries. Whereas, in the Tropics, rodent pests hinder agricultural and livestock production, and cause severe human health problems. Human proximity to rodents is high in Africa; most small holder farmers have high numbers of rodents in their houses and crop fields. Rodenticides and illegal poisons are not the solution for Africa because they are expensive and easily misused. However, novel and innovative research on rodent management is not really happening in Africa due to a lack of private companies and limited private sector rodent pest management services that typically drive R&D investment in places like Europe. This divergence between developed and developing countries with respect to rodent pests and their management means that Africa’s problems with rodents will not be resolved by knowledge transfer from Europe or North America where new solutions are simply not being developed. Africa must take charge of its own agenda and realise that appropriate solutions to its specific problems with rodents must be “home-grown”, therefore, building its own STI capacity among African universities, research institutes, civil society and the private sector. |
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Description of work |
African centre for rodent management. African rodent experts are scattered thinly, often working in isolation within their institution, with few sustainable groups found in the public or private sector. Civil society, environmental health and agricultural extension officers are engaged in rodent pest management activities, often with poor knowledge of alternative rodent management actions. African scientists and practitioners need to network in order to build teams and centres of excellence that can address rodent pest management issues as experienced under African conditions and disseminate best practice knowledge to policy makers, civil society and other researchers. We propose to build a new virtual centre of excellence that will act as a knowledge portal for African rodent pest management services. This web-portal will inter-link research institutes, researchers, civil society, private sector and policy makers. The website will be staffed and maintained by the StopRats action to ensure information is regularly updated and to moderate discussion forums and information exchange. This multi-stakeholder centre will strengthen capacity not only within the countries directly involved but enable stakeholders across the ACP region to participate. This will be facilitated by embedding page translation services for at least French and Portuguese. The website will be designed with different users in mind so that researchers can access scientific information, whilst civil society and private sector users can access leaflets and practical information. However, the strength of the website design will be to encourage multi-stakeholder interaction to encourage innovatory approaches to deliver appropriate rodent management and overcome existing bottlenecks. This interaction will be facilitated as an interactive blog and message board that enables people to engage in real-time open discussion or email exchange. This virtual centre of excellence is strongly interlinked to other activities described in the StopRats proposal. The initial team of users will be the participants of the national stakeholder workshops which includes all the StopRats partners and associates. In the context of these workshops, individuals will use the African centre for rodent management to develop a knowledge database about rodent damage and advertise their experience/roles with respect to rodents. The centre will also act as a portal for the rodent expert panels developed to inform policy makers, enabling two-way communication and exchange of knowledge between policy makers and experts. Thus the African centre for rodent management will supplement and strengthen the face-to-face interactions described in WP1, providing a mechanism to help ensure long-term sustainability of a pan-African network. As the centre develops, it will form the basis of the rodent advisory service described below to put end users in touch with knowledge providers. Write workshop. Many surveys and assessments carried out by the African Union and regional bodies such as SADC and RUFORUM indicate a high priority for capacity building is scientific writing for peer-reviewed journals as well as for grant writing, and these needs have been expressed directly by many African practitioners and senior university managers. Such capacity is not only about how to write such material but interpreting and understanding published material. Understanding and critically critiquing scientific literature are skills often lacking not only within the scientific community but also within civil society and government policy makers. We firstly propose to deliver a series of workshops aimed at assisting individuals to improve their scientific writing. In addition to formal seminars, senior members of the StopRats team will guide practical sessions to help more junior staff, post-graduate students and others involved in such writing, e.g. civil society organisations writing grant proposals. These practicals will ideally be set around the participants’ own existing datasets from work that has not been successfully written up and by targeting current open calls for grant proposals. A mixed mode of workshop delivery will be required to meet participants’ requirements using a combination of distance learning software, face-to-face seminars/workshops and remote mentoring to support participants over the period of time it takes to practically develop a manuscript for submission or meet an existing grant proposal deadline. We expect the majority of participants to be drawn from the involved partner countries; however, participants from other ACP countries will be encouraged through proactive engagement with key institutions in other countries. We expect to be able to offer this write workshop to approximately 150-200 people over the lifetime of the StopRats action, duration will vary from 2 days to 2 months depending on modes of delivery employed. A second part to this activity is to hold critical thinking workshops facilitated by high ranking senior researchers on reading and understanding scientific literature. These workshops will be open to academic institutions as well as government agencies, journalists, the business sector, and civil society organisations. As part of these workshops, individuals will be asked to read journal publications and then summarise what the papers are about in their own words. Examples of “good” and “bad” publications will be used to enable participants to develop critical analytical skills to understand what makes a “good” publication and identify potential faults in the way data are presented or interpreted. Workshops will discuss such issues as empiricism, replication and statistics in the context of understanding the limitations within published work. The objective of these workshops is not to turn policy makers into scientists or vice versa, but to help optimise effective communication between science and policy. In this regard, such a multi-stakeholder workshop will help scientists explain their work in more simple terms as well as enable the lay practitioner to better understand STI processes and scientific jargon. We expect this workshop to be delivered in each target country with approximately 20 people per intake with 3 intakes per country over the duration of the StopRats action, each workshop lasting 2 days. Rodent Advisory Service. Many developed countries have trade bodies and associations that link together private sector pest control services. This is less common in Africa, particularly for rodent pests, and many end users simply do not know where to go to seek out private sector knowledge and services, instead relying on those provided by government and civil society extension programmes. As part of WP1, StopRats proposes to work with existing private sector players in each involved country, forming part of the stakeholder workshops aimed at improving cross-sectoral networking to improve the relevance and capacity of STI towards agriculture and food security issues such as pest rodents. This activity will be derived from the African centre for rodent research described above, utilising the same architecture to develop national level sites and partly based on the many existing sites developed in European countries, e.g. http://www.npta.org.uk and http://www.bpca.org.uk, but with broader stakeholder input (including civil society, government research institutes) to support the relatively underdeveloped private sector on rodent pest management found across Africa. This Rodent Advisory Service marketplace is a highly innovatory approach to disseminating and amalgamating knowledge and could help establish national and regional mechanisms for advising public and private bodies, service providers and end users. We expect national level websites established in each involved country, initially supported by the StopRats action, but eventually the costs of maintaining the website will be met by subscription fees payable by service providers as occurs elsewhere. |
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Deliverables |
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Risks & assumptions |
Routinely high turnover of staff in government agencies can make it difficult to engage policy makers and develop long term support for change within government departments. |
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Work package title |
WP 3: StopRats training and awareness raising programme for the ACP region |
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Lead partner |
Vahatra |
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Involved partners |
All partners – UoNamibia, Concern, UoSwaziland, UoVenda, SokoineUoA, ARC-PPRI, NRI-UoG |
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Objectives |
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Justification |
Scientists and students in Africa interested in field biology and ecology have few opportunities for life-long learning, improving their skills related to wildlife conservation and management. Because of its uniqueness and diversity, African wildlife is an incredibly important resource in terms of promoting tourism and providing jobs related to nature conservation and management. Small mammals (including rodents) are one component within this discipline of wildlife research. Persuading students generally interested in wildlife to consider a career working with rodents will help expand wildlife research opportunities, opening the door to job creation by applying their knowledge to rodent pest management activities. Opportunities for scientific training networks under the StopRats banner will encourage more field scientists, teachers and students across Africa and will inspire a higher level of passion associated with their work, thinking about how their knowledge could be applied to manage rodents in villages, towns and cities as opposed to managing big game in wildlife parks and to have a greater engagement in collaborative research. Wildlife is an incredibly important aspect for the future of Africa and provides a route into primary and secondary education that children can easily relate to in the context of lessons on biology, physiology, ecology, microbiology and disease, the environment, conservation and management of natural resources. Small mammals, particularly rodents, are an accessible group of animals that can be studied locally at different levels throughout the educational system. Awareness about rodents, the damage they cause and potential new solutions for their control, is lacking through all sectors of society. Campaigns that target the general public, civil society and policy makers will help raise the importance of carrying out STI in Africa about rodents, i.e. no one else is going to do it for them. |
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Description of work |
Field schools for rodent knowledge. The principal lead of this WP, Association Vahatra, has been operating field schools for Malagasy students and scientists for nearly two decades with a view to increasing Madagascar’s capacity to document, understand and manage its unique biodiversity. These schools provide training in a number of techniques that are highly relevant to the development of ecologically-based rodent management, such as carrying out habitat surveys, trapping animals, learning about aspects of their natural history, taxonomy, physiology and sample collection for disease screening. The working model employed by Vahatra will be expanded to other African countries involved in the project. For the first field school, scientists and students from the partners directly involved in StopRats will travel to Madagascar to take part in ongoing field schools, mixed with Malagasy students, teachers and professors. In the second and third years of the project, field schools will be established in at least three other StopRats countries to cater for national needs, but also acting as regional hubs by inviting participants from other nearby countries. For example, a South African school could invite participants from Zimbabwe, Zambia, Namibia, Swaziland, Lesotho and Botswana; a Tanzanian school could invite participants from Uganda, DR Congo and Kenya; and a Sierra Leonean school could invite individuals from Liberia, Ghana and Nigeria. An experienced field school organizer from Vahatra will travel to the first school in each region to provide assistance. Field schools are designed to develop and increase skills about rodents and small mammals generally, collecting and preserving specimens, accurately documenting aspects of methodology and field data, to advance ongoing research programmes, e.g. understand breeding and population dynamics to control rodents at the right time. Each school contains approximately 15 participants and lasts about 10 days. Field activities would consist of training on 1) carrying out a general rodent survey in different local habitats (forest, savannah, agricultural mosaic); 2) trapping with different kinds of traps to determine trap success; 3) collecting external/internal data on morphology, ecto- and endo-parasites, epidemiological sample preservation. We would expect field schools to be repeated with different candidates twice per year, each year of the project, the first year in Madagascar only, expanding to three locations in Africa in years 2 and 3. The intake for field schools will be drawn from universities (both lecturers and students), schools (mainly secondary school teachers, but also promising students and primary school teachers). University lecturers and school teachers attending the field schools will simultaneously discuss and develop teaching plans that fit into their relevant subjects and courses taught using aspects of rodents to illustrate issues such as reproduction, evolution, or anatomy whilst sensitising and raising awareness more generally about the need for STI on specifically African-endemic issues. StopRats public debate seminars and presentation training series. In parallel with field schools, we propose to operate a seminar series to encourage public awareness and debate about rodent pests and their management, for example, discussing why solutions for rodent pests are not being researched in Europe or North America and the differences in priorities between developed and developing countries. Senior rodent experts will organise public seminars in local areas where and when field schools are taking place as a means of communicating STI to the general public and raising awareness. Through the stakeholder workshops described in WP1 it will be possible to field a range of speakers from different perspectives and institutions to make public presentations in the evenings whilst field schools are taking place. Advertising the public seminars will happen through schools, sending leaflets home with students and local authorities. Furthermore, as part of this activity we will provide students and advanced graduates opportunities to present recent research activities in front of a supportive and friendly audience, i.e. not open to the general public. Making presentations at conferences and workshops is an important part of science communication, and many young scientists can find this intimidating because they do not receive appropriate training in how to make Powerpoint slides and gain experience in presentation skills. Because the field schools will bring together people from a number of institutions/countries, it provides a convenient opportunity for young scientists to make presentations either before or after the field school at the host partner institution. Part of the process will involve providing feedback to the presenters on how they can improve their visual materials and the way it is presented. Civil society capacity building. Community based organisations, NGOs and knowledge extension programmes often have difficulty in finding appropriate advice about rodent control programmes that they, themselves, are implementing in partnerships with communities. What is often missing is an assessment of how well their interventions have succeeded in reducing the rodent problems and then finding ways to improve the impact of their rodent management interventions. The StopRats action proposes to develop a collaborative programme between rodent experts and civil society institutions to create an applied rodent pest management training programme that involves demonstration and validation of existing and novel methods. This validation and innovation mentoring for civil society groups on research issues such as using case-control empirical methods to validate intervention outcomes will involve a 2-day formal training programme for institutional staff from CBOs and NGOs, followed by demonstrating certain essential activities in a proposed target location, e.g. small-holder farming community, where staff can learn how to do surveys of rodent damage, design environmentally sustainable and cost-effective rodent intervention strategies and monitor results. Demonstration may involve working with CBOs and communities to build examples of rodent-proof food stores to improve food security or how to manage agricultural habitats to reduce the carrying capacity of the environment to reduce the number of rodents. The number of civil society organisations involved will vary from country to country, dependent on size and number of CBOs and NGOs present, but we expect at least 5 institutions per country will receive capacity building on rodent STI for development. StopRats awareness documentaries. The demonstration of best practice rodent management activities with civil society organisations and agricultural communities provides an opportunity to widely raise awareness about rodents and the importance of African innovation to address pest problems. We propose to document the problems farmers have with rodents by videoing the problems and discussions with farmers about their problems. Through this and the demonstration activities carried out as part of CBO capacity building described above, it will be possible to create a video diary of problems and events related to rodents in each of the target countries. Video materials will be edited to produce awareness raising and educational materials in the form of short segments focussing on different problems and solutions. These materials will feed into the field school programmes described above, providing school teachers with material they can use in their lessons, as well as be shown at public debate seminars, and made available via the StopRats project website and distributed to policy makers via the proposed expert panels (WP1). |
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Deliverables |
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Risks |
Travel permits and visas can be difficult to obtain between certain African countries and may prevent some candidates attending field schools. Pre-planning and advanced logistical organisation should help minimise this risk. |
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Work package title |
WP 4: Project management, monitoring & evaluation and communication / visibility |
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Lead partner |
NRI-UoG |
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Involved partners |
All partners – UoNamibia, Concern, Vahatra, UoSwaziland, UoVenda, SokoineUoA, ARC-PPRI |
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Objectives |
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Justification |
Project size, complexity and level of integration/interdependency among different project actions require strict delivery and adherence to project timelines. Inter-regional collaboration must be facilitated to optimise team-building and increase knowledge transfer. Although rodents are a recognised problem, awareness about the true scale of the many problems caused by rodents remains low and/or misinformed through sensational stories and anthropomorphism. With the traditional reliance on poisons to kill pest rodents, little awareness exists on other methods of rodent pest management and their cost-effectiveness. This knowledge needs to be delivered to all stakeholders through various promotional processes. Peer-reviewed publications are the gold-standard of scientific research and influencing scientifically based policies, and good project coordination and support will ensure the maximum number of publications is published in high impact international journals as well as in open access journals. |
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Description of work |
Project inception workshop. A one-week project inception workshop will be held at the outset to enable all partners to define the procedures for working together to establish the project and achieve the project outputs. We will review the contractual arrangements for the financial control of the project and for the assessment of the agreed tasks and deliverables. Work package managers will present strategies and protocols to be discussed and accepted by all partners. The workshop will include training where needed, especially for standardised procedures that need to be followed by different partners. Follow-up coordination meetings. Formal meetings will be organised each year with representation from each partner. In order to provide the project with independent evaluation and ensure key stakeholders are informed of progress, experts and end users will be invited to participate. Through this, meetings will have components that engage with farmers, local leaders and policy makers, NGOs and other scientists to encourage two-way communication. Presentations from each work package leader will summarise activities, followed by group discussions about progress. Potential deviations from the work plan and forward planning will be standing items at each meeting. Activity reporting. Partners will prepare a two-page activity report every six months. The lead applicant and work package managers will use these to assess whether work progresses to plan and take action to minimise the effects of delays on other project activities. Annual progress reports. Annual reports will be provided as instructed by the ACP S&T rules. Work package leaders will be responsible for collating information and making a single WP-report. The lead applicant will be responsible for integrating these into a single full report. A similar approach will be used to prepare the final project report covering information from all project years. Project communication strategy. Implementation of the project communication strategy will be tailored to different recipients including R&D staff, civil society, private sector business, technology end users & the general public, government agencies & policy makers. This will involve the creation of a monitored open access website where all project information will be provided. Confidential information such as protocols, internal reports and presentations will be accessed through password protected pages, enabling the website to act as a project management tool. Outputs of the project such as a centralised database of information and links to existing relevant resources, project-derived publications in peer-reviewed journals, leaflets, training and awareness raising materials, video documentaries and institutional networks will all be facilitated by the website. Visibility. The ACP S&T and EC EDF funding will be acknowledged in all publications derived from project activities. Their logos will be displayed on leaflets and posters produced for farmers and on the project website with links to ACP S&T and EuropeAid home pages. Presentations and posters given at international scientific conferences and any project-organised meetings, pubic seminars and workshops with stakeholders will acknowledge the ACP S&T and EC funding, appropriately displaying their logos. External Advisory Board: An external advisory board constituting international experts in the field of rodent biology and management as well as expertise in developing STI capacity, knowledge transfer and enabling STI in developing countries for socio-economic development will act as a further quality assurance M&E mechanism for the project. The board will include three high ranking individuals who will attend project inception and coordination meetings. Their duties include providing the project with independent monitoring and evaluation to ensure that project activities are of high quality and carried out with the best possible chance of success. |
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Deliverables |
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Risks |
Efficiency of partners’ organisations is affected by political or institutional problems that affect carrying out activities or financial reporting. External Advisory Board or partners are not all able to attend coordination meetings. Feedback can be delivered via other members of this review group. Staff changes at partner institutions, although none anticipated. |