Charting the future of agriculture in Zimbabwe using a ‘Future Search’ event

As I mentioned in my last blog post, agricultural social science research is such an interesting job. My latest activity was participating in an event where we needed to get 100 diverse stakeholders to agree on a common vision for the future of Zimbabwean agriculture. Not an easy task, you say. Correct. Setting up the event is a lot of work. However, once we were all there, it was surprisingly easy to get so many different people to agree on a common vision for the future.

The visioning event was held outside Harare with the Zimbabwe Agricultural Knowledge and Innovation System project, supported by the European Commission and implemented by a number of partners including Welthungerhilfe, SNV, and ICRISAT. It brought together some 100 stakeholders in the agricultural innovation system in the country: Farmers, researchers, policymakers, private sector and development actors, and people from the fields of education and extension. We met for just two days.

The project partners had decided that, rather than determine in advance what the project would do, that we would hold an inquiry process in which we would talk to many key people to understand the state of the agricultural innovation system. This process culminated in the common visioning “Future Search” event. Future Search is a methodology that allows multiple actors to agree on a vision for complex activities. It gives people and institutions who will be involved in the project a chance to jointly shape and co-own the ideas. It helps to create a “new normal” and allow participants to break out of their institutional silos and usual ways of thinking.

^{Kristin Davis/IFPRI}
Participants share their visions.

The Future Search event had three main components: Sharing what we had learned during the interviews and getting feedback on our findings; an imagination session of “what do you see/feel/smell in agriculture in Zimbabwe in 15 years,” where people were encouraged to dream and then share those visions and find the areas of common interest; and then more concretely on the last day, discussing how the project would be implemented based on the common vision.

Future Search has six key principles:

1. The whole system should be in the room
2. We focus on the future—problems are information only
3. We focus on common ground—conflicts are information only
4. We explore the whole elephant before seeking to fix any part of it
5. We promote ownership of the process and results
6. We plan only after consensus on aims, vision, and desires

We grouped participants by both colors and numbers so that we could have mixed groups and also group people by institution. For the first session, project partners presented findings, answered questions, and filled in gaps and missing information at seven stations. To share findings from 56 interviews during the inquiry process, we used tools that allowed for presenting high-level findings of the data (visual tools including mind mapping, problem tree or fishbone analysis, and stakeholder net-mapping; see my previous post for more information). In general, participants expressed agreement on our findings and we filled in missing information. More important, we found ourselves on the same page regarding the status of agriculture in Zimbabwe, its problems and opportunities.

Next, after lunch, people sat back, closed their eyes, and imagined the year 2034 in Zimbabwe (no one fell asleep!). The facilitator told everyone to imagine that they were living in a different Zimbabwe, where all aspects of agriculture were performing, farming was lucrative, exports were vibrant, and everyone wanted to come and see how Zimbabwe did it. The facilitator even sprayed some lemon grass scent to put people in a relaxed and imaginative mood.

After a few minutes, participants went back to their mixed groups and shared what they saw in their mind, what they imagined, wished for, and passionately wanted to happen. Each group then sent out “ambassadors” to go to the other groups and hear their visions. They came back and each finalized their list.

^{Kristin Davis/IFPRI}
Public and private sectors find areas that they agree on for the agricultural centers of excellence.

We then had a break and the facilitators feverishly summarized key features of the visioning exercise. Participants returned, and by sector, discussed five key areas and voted on which they believed were the most important:

1. Institutional capacity: Core departments, commercial orientation, partnerships, skills development
2. Markets: Standards, finance, export, high value
3. High productivity: Climate-smart, sustainable, industrialized, technology, food and nutrition secure
4. Policy: Land tenure, dynamic and responsive, market-driven
5. Inclusivity: Youth, gender, farmer voice

Of course, participants’ dreams and imaginations were much richer and more vivid: they saw green fields, flowing rivers, drones, bullet trains, and highly-skilled personnel. However, to get to the common vision we had to synthesize and generalize.

We also had to come back to reality and figure out what this vision meant for the future of the project and agriculture in Zimbabwe. The only thing that the project had decided in advance was to work through two agricultural centers of excellence. These are two physical sites—the core of ZAKIS—will connect, showcase, and disseminate cutting-edge research and dynamic agricultural education, linked directly into extension, farmer field trials, and feedback systems.

We broke into broad public-sector and private-sector (farmers and businesses) groups and discussed what needs to happen at the agricultural centers of excellence from the perspective of the different actor groups. Participants discussed practical things like how the centers would be governed, how to make them self-sustaining, what services they would offer, and how they could better link the different sectors. For example, participants suggested setting up a strategic advisory committee, developing a workplan and budget, conducting a needs assessment, and developing memoranda of understanding for public-private partnerships.

The last exercise was to group these practical suggestions and see where commonalities existed between the public and private sector groups (there was plenty of overlap). Finally, we discussed commitments, next steps, and the timeline. For instance, a report will be written on the inquiry process and Future Search event. The project will help form an oversight committee for Agriculture Knowledge and Innovation Services in Zimbabwe and agree on its terms of reference. With that, we were done the Future Search event and the inception phase and—finally—ready to get the project underway in earnest!

Kristin Davis is a Senior Research Fellow with IFPRI's Development Strategy and Governance Division.