Have you and your colleagues ever debated which agriculture interventions you should do in an emergency? Did you consider which intervention will have the greatest impact on smallholder farmers’ livelihoods? How did you figure it out? Probably not easily and without much evidence because our field doesn’t have standards yet.  

The SEADS Project is changing this. We are developing international standards that will help you assess, design, implement, and evaluate agriculture interventions to maintain and strengthen the livelihoods of smallholder farming communities before and during emergencies. This guide will make your decisions easier in the next emergency, but we need your help to develop it.

If you have worked on a project that had a positive impact on agricultural livelihoods in an emergency, send evaluations, reviews, assessments, and other project documentation to [email protected]. We will share your evidence with the people who are currently (through October 2020) reviewing all the evidence we can find as the first step in creating the standards.

What counts as evidence?

For this project, evidence includes evaluations, reviews, assessments, and other project documentation that show clear evidence of impact on livelihoods, markets, or systems. For example, we are seeking evidence that shows how a seed distribution improved access to food or income, not a report on how many people received seeds.

What types of interventions should the evidence cover?

Evidence should focus on interventions that:

• Supported preparedness, response, or recovery for any type of emergency
• Targeted smallholder farmers (<2ha) growing annual, perennial, or horticulture crops for food or commercial production in rural, peri-urban, urban, and camp settings
• Targeted one or more of these technical areas:
  • Seed and seed systems: includes direct provision of seeds and support to systems that enable farmers to obtain seeds
  • Integrated pest management and disease control: includes direct provision of pesticides or control accessories and support to systems that enable farmers to respond to pest and disease issues
  • Soil fertility: includes direct provision of fertilizer or application equipment and approaches that enable farmers to improve their soil’s health
  • Agriculture infrastructure, tools, and machinery: includes direct provision of materials and support for infrastructure repairs, maintenance, and market systems to make materials more available
  • Agriculture market systems: includes interventions related to core market function (using, supporting, or developing markets on both supply and demand sides); supporting functions (services and infrastructure); and policies, norms and rules
  • Securing land access: includes primarily indirect interventions that ensure farmers have access to land for production
  • Agriculture knowledge, skills, and abilities transfer: includes methods to assess competencies, design and generate knowledge products, and the associated delivery mechanisms to support various types and scales of training
  • Agriculture production systems: includes package approaches, such as conservation agriculture or hydroponics, that make up a system, not individual interventions under each approach

Note that SEADS is not looking for evidence on forestry, livestock, or fishery interventions.

Please submit evidence to [email protected]. Thank you in advance for your contributions and stay tuned for more opportunities to help shape the SEADS Standards.