N2+meeting+notes+on+baseline+survey+Jan+12+2011

=Meeting notes on N2 Baseline survey – 12/1/10= Present: Alan, Eva, Josie, Alemayehu

Agreements
All general MoU’s are signed except the one with HARC. All specific agreements have been agreed in principle except HARC agreement. Ali of HARC was at ILRI recently and it seems Dr Chillot is concerned because the agreement is not with EIAR but with HARC. **Alan needs to sort this out with Tilahun.** Fogera is being led by Bahir Dar University – they seem happy and no sign of complaints from ARARI. Diga is being led by Bako. Wollega had some issues with IP issues but these have been resolved.
 * Alan to contact Bharat to get signatures from IWMI side.**

Checklists/ Research Protocol
Livelihood focus group discussions will be separate to the others. Farmer selection is still a bit unclear. Need to decide whether to select farmers ourselves or leave it to the DA’s. We will find it difficult to select farmers since we are not on the ground. We could ask DA’s to suggest a pool of farmers in different categories from which we pick at random. **Alemayehu to adjust Research Protocol wording to this effect.** Data collection related to TVETs is a bit unclear. Do we need a separate checklist for them? Idea of interviewing TVETs was to work out their curriculum to know what material farmers are being presented with. **Josie to prepare a checklist**. NGO’s if present should be a compulsory interview. We need to rationalise the number of KI interviews with farmers – **Eva is going to have a look at that.** Site selection within the woredas: might need further consideration. (Larry had some useful points about overall woreda selection). Need to think about how best to select study landscapes. Need to select kebeles to include a gradient of degradation status. **Alemayehu to get kebele list from Amare indicating which are in the hydrological catchment.** Note from Alan: not sure how we judge degradation states of kebeles to allow selection?
 * Alemayehu to send round checklists to partners (to researchers copied to heads)** for comment with the proviso that we need to avoid too many regional variations so we might not be able to incorporate every suggestion. Alan happy to look at draft e-mail from Alemayehu if necessary. Alan (and Eva) keen to get field work started by early Feb so we need to move ahead with this.

Consultant to substitute for Kebebe
Dr Abeje who used to be head of Department of Sociology is sending his CV through. Alan can meet him in Addis on 21st (Alemayehu: could you set up a meeting) but we need to get the consultancy request moving quickly. **Alan to chase Bharat on this.** Related to this, Zelalem of Ripple also needs a consultancy agreement. Need to work out how much money there is in N2 and how many days would be required: 25 or 30 days for stakeholder analysis/ policy analysis/ political economy work. He needs to come on board soon. **Eva to email Bharat about this.**

Field work
Would be good to get this going very early in Feb in at least one site and early to mid-Feb in thesecond sites. Eva and Josie will be in Ethiopia from 14th Feb and could do some work on CPWF from Feb 21st – 23rd. We might have at least two sites going by then. Could hold that meeting in Ambo and have a field visit to Jeldu. **Eva to communicate with Katherine on this.**