Capacity

Method of data collection and data needed to compute the method:

Data is collected from a group of participants about the organizations, groups, and/or individuals that provide services to improve agriculture. One useful tool for the collection of this data is the gender-sensitive venn diagram from the Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security (CCAFS) gender toolkit (Jost et al., 2014).

Ask the participants to identify all of the organizations/groups/individuals, both local and external, that provide services and have an impact related to your area of focus (i.e., projects and activities that improve agriculture). Follow up by asking for a list of organizations/groups/individuals that are non-agricultural (e.g., finance, healthcare, women’s empowerment).

For each contributing organization, group, or individual that is mentioned, ask:

• What are the objectives of the organization?
• How long has the organization existed in the village?
• What has been its most successful project in the village? Why? Who benefited?
• Does this organization it have links with other/outside organizations? For what purpose?
• Who are the main beneficiaries? Men, women, young, old?
• Does one group (social and/or gender) rely more on the organization than others?

Transfer all of the organizations, groups, and individuals onto circles. The participants should decide which list items deserves small, medium, or large circles, to represent each organization’s relative importance to improved agriculture. Different colored circles can be used to indicate perceptions regarding groups or organizations. For example, green can be used to indicate organizations that the participants perceive to be friendly and easy to work with, while red is used for those that use too much scientific language or that do not seem to respect farmers.

Ask the participants if the organizations work together or have overlapping memberships. Leave the circles disconnected if they do not cooperate, use arrows if they only communicate, have them touch if they cooperate, have them overlap if they cooperate extensively.

Discuss the diagram with the following questions:

• Who holds decision-making roles in the organization?
• Does the organization have both men and women participating? If so, in what ways are they participating?
• Do women provide input in this organization? If so, how do the men react to it?
• Does the organization work specifically with women in agriculture or natural resource management?
• Does the organization provide information on farming practices? If yes, what is the nature of this information?
• Who accesses the information provided by the organization? Men? Women? How do they access it?
• Are the specific needs of young and elderly people taken into account by the institution? If so, how?
• Are the specific needs of marginalized groups, for example, ethnically, financially, socially marginalized, considered by the institution? If so, how?

For a variation on the Capacity activity, the UBALE gender analysis report (CRS, 2015) shows the use of a similar tool to explore women’s access to services. Each service provider is listed and the size of the circle reflects the importance of the provider. The circles are then placed on a paper based on how accessible the services are to women, with the most accessible at the top and the least accessible at the bottom.

Unit of analysis:

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Limitations regarding estimating and interpreting:

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