own findings and their messages are powerful in vertical scaling and leveraging political support. The program prioritized working with women farmers, who


make up 70 percent of participants in FFSs. Learning about SRI has given women greater confidence both at home and in public. Also, women farmers have proven to be better at training others than have men. After participating in an FFS, each woman helped, on average, five to eight other farmers adopt SRI principles, while every FFS male participant helped one to three other farmers. Given the growing number of SRI participants and diverse adoption at the provincial level, a rigorous impact assessment is needed. Another achievement of the program has been its success


in leveraging support and resources from the government. At the start of 2011, the government allocated US$383,000 in the six program provinces to support SRI and other low-input, low- carbon agricultural methods. This was one-third more than Oxfam’s contribution. The recognition of SRI as a technological advancement at the central government level and integration with other rural development policy initiatives have been critical in creating space for provincial-level partners to access resources.


The challenge of maintaining political and learning spaces


As SRI gained greater support, there was a risk that proponents would lapse into presenting it as a quick set of prescriptive steps: fixed seedling age, fixed spacing, fixed fertilizer regimes, and fixed water regimes. While this approach will give some positive outcomes, it generally limits farmers’ own learning and the program’s long-term goals. To manage this risk, the program has worked hard to ensure that SRI remains principle based rather than prescriptive. It emphasizes farmer experimentation, which takes more time and requires genuine investments in building the capacity of farmers and the ability of extension service providers to keep pace with the plans of individual farmers. By using this approach, the program also faced the challenge


of integrating empowerment processes aimed at broader social change. The implementation of activities related to gender equality,


for example, have been one-off activities. Oxfam and partners are experimenting with different modes of collaboration at the district and commune levels—with cooperatives, farmers unions, extension centers, and so forth—to help address these issues. Finally, the redefinition of central-local government authority


relations under decentralization processes has created both opportunities and constraints for the scaling up of SRI. The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) is responsible for agriculture policy and for achieving the agriculture targets set out in the government’s five-year plan. It has approved SRI as a technological advance in rice production and recommended its entities apply for participation. Decentralization enables decisionmaking at the provincial level, which leads to uneven adoption of recommendations. Different views exist within MARD and its provincial counterparts on the efficiency in SRI adoption. Provincial support depends heavily on the connections and advocacy capacity of provincial staff. At the national level, Oxfam and PPD are advocating with policymakers to gain their endorsement and address policy contradictions. Documentation of program results and organizing visits to hear directly from farmers are important tools to get buy-in from different policymakers.


Conclusion Having a lasting impact on agriculture on a large scale is urgent


and necessary. This example from PPD and Oxfam illustrates that scaling up warrants a shift in design beyond discrete projects to a longer-term investment in partnership. As the program continues to move ahead in Vietnam, efforts to furthering its reach toward 2 million farmers will continue, but over time local actors, rather than Oxfam, will increasingly have to drive the scaling-up processes, and the emphasis will have to remain on strengthening the capacity and voice of farmers.


For further reading: SRI-Rice ONLINE, http://sri.ciifad.cornell.edu.


Gina E. Castillo (gcastillo@oxfamamerica.org) is a program agriculture strategist. Kimberly Pfeifer (kpfeifer@oxfamamerica.org) is head of research with Oxfam America in Washington, DC. Minh Nguyet Le (leminh@oxfamamerica.org) is Oxfam America’s country representative in Vietnam.


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