“This small business I started with PIP in addition to farming has allowed us to increase household incomes and change the diet. For this reason, the disputes in our household have totally disappeared because the cause was poverty and the lack of consultation on the different activities to be done.”
The previous quote also shows how creating a PIP has changed household dynamics, and triggers families to start implementing their planned activities. Results from the impact study indicate that more than 50% of the 3rd and 4th generation PIP farmers are within a year already halfway the implementation of their PIP. This is above all the result of how motivated PIP farmers with a different mind-set transmit their passion to others. This is what drives the scaling-up of the PIP approach, and as such joint efforts stop land degradation:
”At the community level, our family has engendered a more harmonious understanding in other households, after they had heard my wife’s testimony about how she has changed. The other households were surprised because of this radical change in behaviour. Now she is the one who is mobilizing other households to adhere to the PIP approach because she has lessons to share. In fact, the community calls us ‘the PIP household’.” (2nd generation PIP farmer)
In order to assess motivation, responses by farmers on a set of open questions concerning their future prospects, concrete objectives for the farm and planned investments, were converted into a “motivation score” for each household. Although subjective and based on the what farmers tell, Figure 5 shows a clear pattern of gradually declining motivation from the first to the fourth generation, being lowest among non-PIP farmers. This motivation score was found to correlate with e.g. diversity of land management practices and crop diversity, which shows that working on both aspects together (land and people, as the PIP approach does) is essential.
The qualitative evaluation confirms that the PIP approach has a positive effect on the intrinsic motivation of PIP farmers, especially on their sense of competence to implement their PIP and the planned farm/land practices, as well as on their sense of purpose towards this plan. PIP farmers also often express that they are proud of what they achieve and feel more esteemed than before, both within the household and in the village, resulting in more collaboration and exchange of knowledge. This is nicely expressed by this 2nd generation PIP farmer: