Linking research to advocacy in farmers’ organisations: building on country experiences

Side event organized by AgriNatura and the ESFIM project

Thursday, 23 February 2012 – 14:00-16:00

Oval Room B

Background

Farmers’ organizations (FOs) have a key role to play in advocating for change in policies and institutional arrangements to ensure that such policies and institutional arrangements meet the needs of their membership. However, farmers’ organizations often lack access to the information and evidence needed to develop pro-active proposals for change. In addition, the link between farmers’ organizations and national and international research is often weak, with a lack of research results on topics that matter most to farmers’ organizations and their members.

This side event presents the experiences emerging from the Empowering smallholder farmers in markets (ESFIM) programme. Through collaboration between national farmers’ organizations, local research providers and members of the AGRINATURA consortium, the ESFIM programme seeks to support and foster a research-advocacy interface that generates demand-driven action research supportive of policy activities that farmers’ organizations have themselves prioritized.  read more »

ESFIM Progress Report 2011

The ‘Support to advocacy agenda through collaborative research’ component of the ESFIM programme assists NFOs in developing countries with formulating feasible, evidence-based propositions for changes in key elements in the institutional environment that will enable effective market access for small-holders. In the annual report (ESFIM Progress report January-December 2011-En), an update of the progress of AGRINATURA research support is presented for the year 2011.

CSA-PAEPARD workshop report on ‘Farmers’ organizations and agricultural research for development in Africa’

 

Dear colleagues, dear friends,

 

With important delay due to lateness of translation, the report of the workshop « Farmers’ organizations and agricultural research for development in Africa: roles, complementarity with others stakeholders and partnerships institutionalization » organized within the scope of the PAEPARD project is now available on the CSA website!

See http://www.csa-be.org/spip.php?page=seminaire&id_rubrique=12&id_mot=187.

Best regards and best wishes!

Julie Flament

(Español) Gran triunfo de los cooperativistas: PCM anuncia retiro de proyectos de ley que buscaba derogar Ley del Acto Cooperativo

Sorry, this entry is only available in Español.

ESFIM presented emerging learning on collaborative research on International Conference in Nairobi

 

 

 

 

 Giel Ton, ESFIM programme coordinator, presented the emrging lessons from the colaborative research during a session on “Learning Networks” during the International Conference ”Innovation in Extension and Advisory Services”. The efforts in ESFIM to establish an interface between the research community and farmers’ organisations’ advocacy efforts, is example of a change in an innovation system around institutions for smallholder market access.

The main objective of ESFIM was to generate a successful pilot experience to articulate NFOs with evidence-based policy formulation and strategic advocacy on issues that benefit smallholders’ empowerment in markets. A precondition for participating FO’s is that they have a positive attitude towards the role of evidence-gathering to validate and refine their policy proposals. The ensuing assumption is that this drives the willingness of FO’s to create sustainable linkages with research institutes, NGOs and universities. ESFIM worked only with organisations that had already a minimum of experience in advocacy. Indeed, the articulation with organisations that had an extensive trajectory of advocacy provided better conditions to focus research than the organisations with little experience. 

The major ESFIM management challenges that appeared in the process are related to the budget allocation between contracted research support and member consultation processes. This affects the core of the ESFIM programme, the objective to establish a functioning interface for articulating research support with policy definition and advocacy in farmers’ organisations. It proved necessary to convince the (changing) leaders and stakeholders of the resources, time and effort required to have quality and evidence-based research findings. A separation of funds for contracted research separate from funds for participatory processes may resolve this tension. Part of the ESFIM funds could be put in an ESFIM Research Support Funds: country-specific competitive funds, eligible to farmers organisations only, and exclusively for contracting research support to them.

EFIM has just started up.  After some years of ESFIM-type of activities, the NFO’s will have increased ‘living experiences’ with managing research assignments and articulating more precise research needs. They will have gained experiences with a wider group of researchers and consultants, and will deepen their relation with the ones that have gained trust and respect. Step-wise increases of mutual trust between researchers and NFO-leaders and -staff, coupled with transparent and farmer-led grant funds with a governance structure that anticipates the eventual biases due to internal funding needs of NFOs and/or the professional preferences of researchers are the key components to harness the research-advocacy interface of NFOs.

The presentation can be downloaded here: Extension 2011 -ESFIM – Giel TON

 

Progress report on NAADS ‘fire place conversations’

 

Progress Report on NAADS and proposals for Reform – UNFFE fnl - June 2011
This action study focuses on the National Agricultural Advisory Services (NAADS), a heavily capitalised program of government that aims at transformation of public delivery of agricultural extension services into a largely private sector-led delivery system under a client or farmer controlled arrangement. Preliminary findings show there islimited understanding of NAADs operations amongst farmers, inadequate focus on farmer constraints like labour, access to inputs, ineffective extension services for crop and animal farmers, unresolved market access issues, unclear NAADs farmer credit schemes among others!

Eight districts have so far been covered; the next phase will target 40 sub-counties in the entire country. This progress report highlights key insights from the field (captured in photographs and draft narrative) that will be distilled in the final report. The final report, will detail specific proposals for NAADs reform. These proposals will be the fodder for The farmers Green Print on NAADS.

KENFAP discussed Warehouse Receipt Systems

Edward Kateiya presented a Powerpoint presentation on a study on WRS, Warehouse Receipt Systems(ESFIM case study Report – PRESENTATION at Validation workshop-8.11.2011). The report was dicussed during a workshop on 8 November 2011.

The study recommend innovative progression simple storage facilities at strategic grain collection and bulking sites at village level to fully fledge WRS. This will promote use of simple technologies such as solar drying and moisture testing meters at the farm level. It is imperative to organize smallholder farmers into association and built their capacity to engage in collective action in management and ownership of collection centers at strategic location in the village level. Price volatility and weather conditions pose a great challenge to the implementation of the WRS hence need for innovative insurance packages to mitigate the above risks. There need for harmonized storage charges and standardization quality requirement to facilitate trading. It is paramount for the government to provide enabling environment through appropriate national policy and legal framework to guide and transact business. Cooperative approach in development of WRS is recommended with a back up of support services and enabling environment.