Farmer Organizations and Demand-Driven Extension

Brent M. SimpsonSenior Agricultural Officer, Investment Center, FAO

June 4, 2015MEAS Symposium

“Strengthening the Role of Farmer-to-Farmer Extension and Farmer Organizations in Extension”

Farmer Organizations: A definition

FOs: have a defined membership, a purpose for assembling and organizational structure established to support members in pursuing their individual and collective interests.

One "essential function is to organize relations with the external world,” to mediate between members and “…others who act in their economic, institutional, and political environment.” (Haubert and Bey, 1995)

Exploring Farmer Organizations in Demand-Driven Extension

Two assumptions:• Working with farmer groups is essential in

strengthening farmers’ capacities to engage in a wide range of rural development activities, markets and policy formulation;

• The type of investments in rural advisory services (RAS) influences not only the services available but groups’ capacity to make effective demands on service providers.

Review OutlineRegulatory and Organizational Conditions– Constitutional and regulatory frameworks– Group’s origins– Levels of organization

Decentralization of GovernmentOrganizational Concerns– Problem identification and resolution– Organization, membership and homogeneity– Education and literacy– Leadership and management– Business and financial management

Policies/Strategies

Review Outline

Farm Types– Commercial– Mixed-farming– Subsistence-oriented

Investments in RAS– Contractual/financial– Project/technology-based– Process/social

RAS Investment Type & Farmer Organization Assets

Types of Investments

Member-ship

Financial Human/Problem Solving

Leadership Social/Networking

Contractual/FinancialProject/TechnologyProcess/Social

Investment Types and Farmer Empowerment and Demand Driven RAS

Types of Investments

Self-Reliance Provisioning/Access to RAS

Accountability & Responsiveness

Opportunities to Influence Policy

Contractual/FinancialProject/TechnologyProcess/Social

Going Forward

• Functional barriers to farmer organization development must be correctly identified and addressed. Failure to do so will meet with limited success, and more likely result in outright failure in achieving enduring impact.

• Groups themselves, as well as their needs, evolve. Evidence does not support the assumption that, once formed and functioning, groups will independently meet all of their future requirements.

• In supporting market-oriented RAS efforts, the market for which farmers are producing and a viable business model for accessing this market must be understood, as well as the group’s relation to others within the value chain. It cannot be assumed that producer groups already understand their opportunities and functioning of their selected value chains.

Going Forward• Farmer groups are not uniform, one-dimensional entities, and

treating them as such trivializes their integrity and invariably results in mismatches between outsiders’ expectations and group members’ interests and needs.

• Establishing and maintaining group autonomy to define and pursue the group’s own development goals is critical. For the sake of expediency, development interventions where intermediaries insert their objectives and functionally occupy critical roles can create a situation in which groups begin serving out siders’ interests and will likely fail to fill the operational gaps when external assistance is removed.

• Labelling as “demand-driven” those interventions in which farmer organization inputs ultimately have little impact on prioritization, or in which they are effectively used to validate external interests, is disingenuous and unlikely to lead to enduring contributions by the organizations in shaping outcomes.

Going Forward

• In the context where groups themselves must ensure their own RAS needs to remain viable, experience shows that this is best achieved where the costs of RAS can be appropriately blended with other essential services of group functioning.

• The growing trend of merging farmer organization development efforts with farmer-to-farmer service provisioning requires careful consideration, especially where a demand-driven approach is being used.

• In working with groups, RAS initiatives must prepare for the time and skills needed for group-based approaches to take hold and prosper. Seemingly obvious, this rule is violated in more instances than not.

MEAS Best Practice Discussion Paper 5

Bingen, R.J. and B.M. Simpson. 2015. Farmer Organizations and Modernizing Extension and Advisory Services: A framework and reflection on Cases from Sub-Saharan Africa. MEAS Discussion Paper 5. Champaign-Urbana, Ill: University of Illinois.

Disclaimer

This presentation was made possible by the generous support of the American people through the United States Agency for International Development, USAID. The

contents are the responsibility of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID or the United States Government.