The Massire project aimed to build the capacities of actors of oases and arid regions. It paid specific attention to young women and young men involved in small-scale farming. The project adopted an approach focusing on agricultural and rural innovation systems, which entails that factors influencing the design, adoption and diffusion of innovations are always both of technical and social nature.
The fact that an innovation has shown to be efficient somewhere does not mean it will be automatically adopted elsewhere. There is a need for coalitions of actors to support its test, possibly to modify it to suit local needs, and to implement it. Moreover, there are always risks that innovations bring negative effects, thus it is important to support coalitions of actors in dealing with these risks.
The Massire project aimed to help farmers of small-scale farms take a central role in sustainable agricultural and rural innovation systems. In these systems, these farmers can continually interact with actors related to innovations (private sector, public administrations, NGOs, research institutes, etc.) so as to identify, implement and evaluate these innovations.
In order to identify the innovations which have a large potential to enhance the resilience of farmers involved in small-scale family farming, and to define the adaptation necessary for their diffusion at a large scale, the project had set three specific objectives:
- selecting, among the diversity of innovations taking place in oases and arid regions (or similar contexts), those that present the highest potential for improving the resilience of oases and arid territories ;
- With groups of actors from these territories, experimenting these innovations to confirm this potential and identify the conditions for adoption and diffusion ;
- Strengthening actors’ capacities, in particular those of young women and young men involved in small-scale family farming, and helping them build sustainable connections to functioning agricultural and rural innovation systems