Irrigation is one of the first forms of mechanization that smallholder farmers adopt, such as pumps to draw water from the ground, making mechanization a transformative approach with the power to advance food security, while creating access to education, equality, and economies of scale.
For Clark, introducing a piece of technology is more than just importing a piece of efficiency-enhancing equipment. For livelihoods to be truly transformed, she weaves together an ecosystem of actors which allow the technology to generate continued prosperity, education and well-being.
“USAID projects can’t spend decades training people. It has to come locally, and be sustainable within their own systems,” she says.
Clark currently leads the scaling of the soybean thresher for the Feed the Future Soy Bean Innovation Lab. Now, leveraging that experience, she has joined the University of Nebraska’s proposal for the Innovation Lab for Irrigation and Mechanization systems. As Principal Investigator for University of Missouri under an ILIMS supported project, she will lead a team across Feed the Future countries to develop and customize a methodology, and conduct a Capacity Needs Assessment. This will help to fill in knowledge gaps on the types of skills and capabilities that are required to support sustainable scaling of irrigation and mechanization.
The soybean thresher has now improved hundreds of lives for its ability to cut harvest time and physical burden, particularly for women. However, before accomplishing those strides, the thresher faced key barriers of lack of access to local manufacturing and relevant education needed for scaling.
The ability to produce machinery locally, Clark says, is important. “When you import a machine, there’s no part-support, there’s no service-support. But when you teach people to build it locally, you build industry. People need manufacturing, and you need manufacturing to build a middle class.”
To overcome these barriers, Clark made a connection in the blacksmithing community in Ghana, and began a journey of insights. She learned that they did in fact have relatively robust manufacturing capacity. However, because almost all equipment in Ghana is imported, they didn’t have access to good designs. “Somebody would import a piece of equipment, and then [the artisans] would try to slyly get over to see it and either memorize it or take pictures and then try to rebuild it from memory.”
Clark points out this is something sometimes taken for granted in the U.S. - the relative accessibility of technology and manufacturing, and the level of educational access that comes with it. “Here, someone can get an internship at John Deere.” However, in Ghana, “You can’t teach somebody how to build a combine if there’s no combine in the country.” For this reason, a lot of agricultural advancement is stunted by importation. Clark saw a multitude of comprehensive, inclusive training and education opportunities by building local manufacturing systems.
SIL held a design contest for a locally suitable thresher that they could make publicly available. They received great designs, and when SIL offered a fabrication course, there was a flood of interest. SIL trained over 200 fabricators in twelve countries, which has produced efficiency and safety in labor, business opportunities for women, access to markets, and even saved entire harvests. Importantly, the threshers can be built and maintained locally, and the design will continue to be taught through the trained fabricators.
Working as the Principal Investigator for University of Missouri on ILIMS, Clark says that she looks forward to the opportunity to expand on and formalize the lessons learned from SIL. Some of the same capacity and scaling ideas can be applied to irrigation and mechanization. In fact, she says, the thresher they built in Ghana can also serve pumping for irrigation when the engine is removed. “It’s the same thing. It’s the same equipment.”
Like the thresher, an irrigation pump is also a key piece of equipment that can alleviate farmer drudgery in the field, and significantly improve crop efficiencies. Other transformational outcomes include improved health, equity and nutrition security through protected water and diets, as well as improved climate adaptation and strengthened resilience.
By illuminating the knowledge gaps of the skills and capabilities that are needed to support and scale technology supply, adoption by farmers, and long term use, Clark’s research will contribute to ILIMS’s enabling of food security, while creating access to education, equality, and economies of scale through irrigation and mechanization in Sub-Saharan Africa.
