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DOCUMENTATION FOR CHANGE

All over the world, farmers are innovating, and professionals are supporting them to develop agriculture. Most efforts have a positive impact, but this is generally limited to a specific region, or to a short period of time. A key ingredient for upscaling and sustaining this impact is to write down what was done right, and also what went wrong, and then disseminate the lessons learnt. Unfortunately, this is not easy: it is rare that time and effort is put into organising , analysing and documenting experiences, for various reasons.

With this section, ILEIA wants to encourage practitioners to sit back, analyse their work and get out a few lessons, and put them down on paper, learn from their own experience, and at the same time help others learn as well. Farmers, field workers and officials can thus contribute to the existing body of knowledge on small scale farming.

This site is divided into different sub-sections, each looking at one specific aspect. Each one brings a set of lessons and recommendations, all of them emerging from real-life cases.

The selection on how to document is at the same time sub-divided, with separate pages looking at each of the steps of a documentation process. You can find different examples, with each section presenting more lessons and recommendations. Each section also has links to articles published in LEISA Magazine.

Download: "Documentation, capitalisation, sistematizacion: A compilation of methods and approaches" Bertie van der Meij et al., 2008 "Du terrain au partage: Manuel pur la capitalisation des experiences" IED, 2008 "Learning from experience: A manual for organising, analysing and documenting field based information" Jorge Chavez-Tafur et al., 2007

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Call for articles Have you been documenting your work? Are you busy with a systematization process? We would like to hear from you. Please submit your story! Write to ILEIA at j.chavez-tafur@ileia.nl