inventory of farmer study group initiatives in africa - Share4Dev.info

Inventory of Farmer Study Group Initiatives in Africa – A Synthesis Report
Arnoud R. Braun
forum for Government policy makers from a wide range of African countries to
share experiences on agricultural advisory services.
While demand-driven extension is now widely believed to improve the
effectiveness of conventional extension approaches it still remains unclear how
demand-driven services can be put into practice effectively (Neuchatel Group,
2004). Further, as the system of extension changes, increased attention is given
to the question what kind of services are in demand by farmers. In addition,
increased knowledge about poor people’s livelihoods has shown that the poor
draw on multiple strategies to secure a livelihood that go far beyond simply
production (Farrington et al., 2002; Christoplos, 2003), and extension therefore
needs to adjust accordingly.
To achieve agricultural and rural development new approaches to extension are
needed that make better use of knowledge among farmers, and provide them
with a stronger voice to demand for advice and services, and negotiating power
(Christoplos, 2003). Emergent questions are how poor, weak and vulnerable
groups can be strengthened to experiment, enhance, share and spread their own
knowledge and how they better can articulate their needs. This requires a shift
from previous perceptions where farmers were seen mainly as ‘adopters’ or
‘rejecters’ of technologies but not as providers of knowledge and improved
practices (Leeuwis, 2000). One of the main goals of demand-driven extension is
to develop independent producer organisations that can articulate demands and
negotiate for services. However, such organisations cannot be established from
the outside, but have to grow from the ground though social mobilisation.
Various programmes and initiatives in the region are involved in farmer education
in which various aspects of demand-driven extension are being applied. The
concept of community participation is generally very well incorporated in such
initiatives. However, participatory tools and methods are often limited to initial
community development activities, such as visioning of goals, identification of
problems, opportunities and intervention priorities. Actual training and capacity
building activities that follow are often done through conventional training in
which an expert trains farmers on the identified topics. There has not been a
widespread recognition of problem-based, experiential learning techniques, nor
has there generally been recognition for the fact that facilitating such type of
learning often requires very different set of skills by the field worker than the ones
of the traditional extension worker. Even though agriculture is a good entry point
for community development, it is imperative that extension provision broadens
out to cover a larger spectrum of livelihood issues.
Challenges and opportunities for FSGs
Changing extension systems. Extension staff who long have been involved in
T&V type of extension approaches tend to have a strong technical bias and even
though participation is a common concept for most staff, they still often lack
capacity to put participatory learning into practice. This affects the level to which
study group initiatives are demand-driven and farmer-centred. In FFS this is a
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