People's participation in development has been promoted for over 20 years, yet it is still commonplace for projects to be pre-designed, without more than a token consultation with those farmers for whom they are intended. This book describes a project among small-scale farmers in the drought-prone and arid communal lands of Zimbabwe which, within the broad remit of promoting food security, helped the farmers identify their problems and choose their own solutions to them. The aim of the project was participatory technology development: to extend the range of soil-and-water conserving farming techniques available to men and women, and to help them evaluate and disseminate these and their own traditional techniques so as to improve the returns from their land.

Helen Wedgwood, Cathy Watson, Everjoice J. Win, Clare Tawney, Kuda Murwira