On Tuesday May 27, 2025, around 40 people took part in the workshop organized by INADES-Formation to present the Agroecology Evaluation Guide. The guide is the fruit of collaboration between GTAE member organizations and research institutes.
Faced with the challenge of sustainable agriculture for the benefit of people and the planet, agroecology is a viable and relevant solution.
The evidence of its performance is becoming clearer by the day, and more and more voices are being raised in defense of this production model, calling for it to be taken into account in agricultural policies.
To contribute to the success of agroecological transitions, facilitate the implementation of agroecology and strengthen advocacy in its favor, the member organizations of the Working Group on Agroecological Transitions, notably Agrisud International, AVSF, Cari and GRET, in collaboration with research institutes, have drawn up an agroecology evaluation guide.
This guide proposes an approach and methodological tools to assess the effects of agroecological practices and systems on the agroenvironmental and socioeconomic performance of agriculture, and the conditions for the development of agroecology.
It is aimed at development players, farmers and decision-makers.
At the initiative of INADES-Formation, the guide was presented to development players and managers of cooperatives benefiting from the CACAOECO project, during a workshop on Tuesday May 27, 2025 at the M’Maya Hotel in Abidjan.
The two presenters, Laurent Levard, an agroecologist with GRET, and Bertrand Mathieu from AVSF, outlined the background to the drafting of the guide, and its purpose and content. This agroecology evaluation guide is structured in three parts:
- The first part deals with the general approach to one-off and follow-up evaluations.
- The second part includes evaluation sheets with categorizations and criteria for measuring the “agroecoscore” of plots and territories.
- The third part contains methodological supplements in the form of tool sheets.
Participants were very pleased with the presentation of this guide.
For Mr. Sikeli Jean Paul, Executive Secretary of COPAGEN, “the agroecology evaluation guide is a fine tool, a very useful decision-making aid that will enable farms that are not yet in the agroecological transition to move towards this model. The exchanges were extremely useful, and we sincerely hope that there will be more of this type of event in the future, with more time to allow a better appropriation of the tool in question, which is quite dense”.
Paul Kokora, President of the Côte d’Ivoire agroecology coordination group, expresses his satisfaction. “I’ve just learned a lot, because I had trouble monitoring agroecological projects. With this tool, we can see that the evaluation of agroecology contains many criteria. This tool needs to be disseminated more widely so that everyone can make it their own. Thank you to the organizers.
Mr. Ebe Serge, Director of a cooperative, believes that the guide is very important, as it enables producers in agro-ecological transition to fully appreciate their progress: where they started and what level they are at.
The guide can be downloaded free of charge online and is also available in printed form from Éditions Quae.
