How reading a manual on documenting experiences led to a new lobbying tool – Wirsiy Eric Fondzenyuy works for CENDEP, the Centre for Nursery Development and Eru Propagation, in Cameroon. At the end of last year he contacted ileia, wanting to share the results of their documentation efforts. This is part of their story.
Farming Matters | 26.2 | June 2010
CENDEP was set up in 1999 as a farmer group, with the mission of assisting and training farmers in the sustainable production and marketing of Non Timber Forest Products.
We work in the Northwest and Southwest regions of Cameroon, focusing partly, but not exclusively, on the domestication of eru (Gnetum spp.), a forest vegetable with high economic and social importance, and on developing a value chain for it.
A short documentation process
A couple of years ago we received the manual “Learning from experience” from ileia, together with LEISA Magazine (as Farming Matters was then called). Interested in sharing the lessons we had learned from our work, we used this booklet to develop a set of guidelines for a documentation process and began documenting our work in September 2009. We organised meetings with all our stakeholders and collected a lot of information.
We used different indicators for our analysis, such as access to financial resources or the interest of participants, and also carried out a SWOT analysis. Some aspects of the process were not easy, but we were soon able to draft a first document in which we identified some of the factors that have contributed to the success of our project, and also the main difficulties we experienced. We feel it reflects what we have learned about our work.
This was our first attempt in documenting our project experiences. We started it because we wanted to make our work visible. As part of our “organisational scaling up” (as mentioned in the first issue of Farming Matters) we wanted to increase the capacity of our staff in documentation (learning by doing) without having to interrupt our activities in the field. We were also hoping to get advice from an organisation like ileia. Finally we thought this could arouse interest from donors to support the further implementation of our project. So we are now using the results of this work as a fundraising tool.
We strongly believe that it is useless to document an experience if the final product will stay on the shelves or in computers in an office. We therefore plan to share the final result with the organisations that we collaborate with in the field, as well as with other individuals and institutions who show interest in our work. This is an important lobbying tool for us and we are planning to make good use of it.
Wirsiy Eric Fondzenyuy
Wirsiy Eric Fondzenyuy (wirsiyef@yahoo.com), Monitoring and Evaluation Officer, CENDEP. P.O. Box 742, Limbe, Cameroon. More information can be found on CENDEP’s website and also on the documentation section of our site, where we have included two full PDF articles showing the work of CENDEP and the process they have gone through.
