RESEARCH PROFILE
	LOCAL INSTITUTIONS Local institutions such as the iddir in Ethiopia help to enhance community solidarity and have important livelihood functions including savings/credit and risk aversion, and are an under-exploited resource in development.

In recent years, the role of local social organization and institutions for development has been underscored. "Informal" local groups have played a key role across the African continent in survival, social learning and support, labour sharing, risk sharing and have more recently been harnessed to plan and implement development activities by research and development organizations. AHI has used farmer research groups as entry points for technology development and up-scaling, watershed organizations for resource management issues requiring larger units of intervention and has built upon traditional social organizations for some tasks.

Current reforms in extension systems in eastern Africa have placed new demands on farmer institutions, which are now assuming new roles in articulating demands of larger constituents and contracting service providers to address their development needs (supply of technologies, information delivery, capacity building). In the case of Uganda, extension reforms under the National Agricultural Advisory Services (NAADS) considers farmer institutional development (FID) a foundation and prerequisite to demand-driven service delivery and empowerment. AHI has been involved in two phases of farmer institutional development under NAADS. In the first phase, farmer groups in Kabale District selected AHI to facilitate farmer group formation and registration during the first phase of NAADS implementation. In a second phase of work, AHI joined together with other development organizations under the CEED Coalition and began jointly facilitating participatory action learning to understand how farmer organizations under NAADS could perform more effectively and derive greater benefits from the NAADS policy. In the most recent phase of involvement, AHI was contracted by NAADS to conduct a national FID study to capture lessons from several districts across Uganda. This study has confirmed to NAADS that problems faced in Kabale were similar to those faced throughout Uganda, leading NAADS to institutionalize some of the novel innovations from CEED's action learning work in Kabale at national level. This consisted, most notably, in the formation of lower-level farmer organizational structures at Parish level in all districts where NAADS operates to ensure there are effective "checks and balances" on Sub-County Farmer Fora—the lowest level structures originally envisioned under NAADS. These Farmer Fora, charged with articulating demands of their constituents and contracting out services, were seen to be a bottleneck in equitable access to services within NAADS.

AHI works with the "social infrastructure" of development in other sites and projects, experimenting with ways of linking local level institutions with district development actors and local government; researching ways to enhance equity and farmer investment in "public goods"; and researching how traditional institutions—often "invisible" to development actors—can be built upon in new R&D efforts. These social dimensions of development and NRM, often overlooked by the focus on material inputs, have been found to be fundamental building blocks to any development endeavor.