Prioritising participant comfort to co-design with young farmers in Sub Saharan Africa

Here I Am partnered with creative agency Ravel to deliver a Youth Engagement Study with young farmers in Nigeria, Tanzania and Rwanda, on behalf of One Acre Fund.

Here I Am led the formative research phase of the project and Ravel will go on to design a communication strategy informed by the findings.

The objective of the study was to understand the agricultural experience of young farmers, especially women, and to identify barriers and opportunities for them to access and adopt profitable, sustainable, climate resilient agricultural practices.

Knowing rural young farmers, especially women, would be unfamiliar with this type of engagement, we took a peer-to-peer research approach, creating a space where young farmers felt confident to share their experiences and ideas. Young researchers used our ethical research platform - Fatima - to collect rich multimedia data from the comfort of young farmers' homes.

Agriculture employs more youth in Africa than all other professions combined - 68% of youth active in the workforce are employed on family farms. Therefore, One Acre Fund believes youth will be at the centre of Africa’s climate resilience and food security.

One Acre Fund is working on an initiative to grow resilience through climate action and youth empowerment. Through this work, they will demonstrate that African climate-smart agriculture can create new income opportunities for mass numbers of youth and young female farmers.

We adopted a peer-to-peer research approach to ensure participants, especially young women, felt comfortable and confident to speak openly. Young women were always interviewed by other young women, and all-female focus groups were held to encourage open discussion and co-develop solutions to gender-based barriers. We always worked respectfully within cultural norms, such as, seeking husbands’ permission for interviews with female farmers when appropriate.

To maximise comfort, research was conducted in familiar settings such as participants’ homes, on their farms, or in community spaces where people regularly gather.

To deliver this approach, we recruited and trained a network of young researchers, equipping them to use our ethical research tool, Fatima.

Fatima is designed specifically to collect multimedia data, ethically and securely, in this remote peer to peer context.

• Its intuitive design supports users of any experience level to collect quality data, enabling the young researchers trained for this project to easily adopt the tool
• Its ability to collect data offline enabled researchers to travel to remote farms and interview participants in areas of low-to-no connectivity
• Multimedia data collection including audio, photos, and single and multiple-choice questions brought to life the farmer experience
• And finally, Fatima ensures participants fully understand their rights at all times with best-in-class informed consent, which breaks up consent information into bite-sized pieces throughout the research process

To understand how young people can engage and thrive in agriculture, we explored the wider ecosystem influencing young farmers and their level of autonomy.

Our main focus was active young farmers, both male and female, ranging from those leading their own farms to those working on family farms or employed in the agricultural value chain. We also included non-farmers interested in joining the sector to explore entry barriers.

We identified 'bright sparks' within One Acre Fund’s customer base. Young, climate-smart farmers, such as Cooperative Leaders, successfully using a range of products and services in their farming. In-depth interviews helped us understand the factors behind their success.

Finally, we interviewed key figures in young farmers’ lives, such as parents, husbands, community leaders, and One Acre Fund staff, to understand the social and systemic influences shaping youth engagement in agriculture.

Creative activities and projective techniques were central to the research design, enabling young farmers to express themselves and co-design the support they want from One Acre Fund in a way that was both engaging and enjoyable.

As Human Centred Designers, we went beyond simply asking about their farming lives and instead worked with them to design solutions that would compliment their farming routine and areas of interest. This collaborative approach surfaced ideas from the young farmers that will guide the next stages of design.

Audio presentations of creative activities and photos of the hand written worksheets offered rich insight into farmer personalities and aspirations.

Creative activities included;

• Persona activity – A projective exercise where participants imagine a young farmer like themselves, illustrate the persona, and describe their life. This method encourages farmers to share personal experiences through a fictional character.
• Love, Lack, Long for activity – A reflective exercise where participants explore their farming lives by sharing what they appreciate, what’s missing, and what they aspire to.
• Idea canvas - An opportunity for young farmers to collaborate in groups to design solutions for them to adopt profitable, sustainable, climate resilient agricultural practices.

Across the three regions we conducted 239 In Depth Interviews and 27 Focus Group Discussions. We also conducted remote interviews with over 600 One Acre Fund customers to understand their perception of the One Acre Fund brand. Once data collection was complete, we used a behavioural science lens in analysis, looking to identify barriers and motivators across key psychosocial drivers of change.

These were then translated into an integrated insights report which was immediately adopted by One Acre Fund country teams to inform their activity.

This report now forms the brief for the second phase of the project, designing the communication strategy to engage young farmers, especially women, in each of the three regions. Design sprints led by the creative agency Ravel are now taking place in each country.

Meanwhile our peer-to-peer research approach now acts as a blueprint for best practice within One Acre Fund, with both the data collected, and stories from researchers in the field.