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Moderated conference on rural advisory services for family farms: 1-18 December 2014

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"Moderated conference on rural advisory services for family farms: 1-18 December 2014" <[log in to unmask]>
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This is Klaus Fleissner from AVRDC again. 



I want to commend Julie Nakalanda Matovu from Uganda for her honesty in the statement (in Message 10) that "as advisory service providers, we tend to push our defined agendas as already predetermined by the project we work for". 



This for me is the plain truth and the reason, why agricultural development efforts have barely generated sustainable impact for smallholder farming families in Africa. She also appraised very rightly the complexity of smallholder family farms with its implications "in terms of farming system, skills, income levels, etc.".  



With 28 years of working experience in agricultural research, rural development and natural resource management in Sub-Saharan Africa, I have worked with the farming systems, the livelihoods, the action research and other participatory approaches, which were all meant to develop a bottom-up development agenda and ensure that smallholders evolve beyond subsistence production levels. They came in many cases not out on top for rural development, because they were expedited by donors, government institutions and the international research community. Being quite resource demanding and only delivering punctual impact, one turned to more attractive approaches as funding for these approaches decreased. 



But the Forum for Integrated Resource Management (FIRM) approach, promoted by the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) and colleagues in the Desert Margins Program (DMP) early in the new millennium in Southern Africa was, and remains in my eyes, the climax in participatory approaches (as the short summary from the DMP website at the end of this message intends to show). Why was this approach never mainstreamed? In my opinion, this was because governments and international research and development organizations were no longer the determining factors and drivers of development!



Dr. Klaus Fleissner

Agronomist\Breeder - Vegetable Cropping Systems 

AVRDC - The World Vegetable Center 

West and Central Africa 

Liaison Office Cameroon 

P.O. Box 2008 

Messa, 

Yaoundé, 

Cameroon 

T  + (237) 22 10 84 48 M + (237) 76 78 14 89

Skype: fleissner_kwe

E-mail: klaus.fleissner (at) worldveg.org http://avrdc.org

 

From http://www.dmpafrica.net/FIRMoverview.htm :

"Being FIRM about Community Leadership 

What is FIRM, and why?

'Think global, act local' has become a slogan that, like so many others, belies the complexity—and richness—of the process that it zips into a sound bite.



All too often in the past, strong global organizations have attempted to impress solutions on local communities regardless of their interest (or lack of). Local action must be carried out by local actors if it is to be sustainable. They need to be in the driver's seat, determining what they want, and committing to follow it through.



FIRM (Forum for Integrated Resource Management) is shorthand for an approach that puts rural communities in charge of their own development. A Community-Based Organization (CBO)" [and here I see for agricultural smallholder development the link to agricultural resource center, as described in my earlier Message 18] "organizes, plans and monitors development activities while coordinating the interventions of others, called 'service providers' (SO). SOs may be traditional authorities, government extension services, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or project teams.



The FIRM approach can take many institutional forms, but all include these key elements:

• A community-based structure to take the lead (CBO);

• An annual planning meeting organized by the CBO, inviting and involving service organisations (SO);

• At least half-yearly, a review/monitoring and evaluation meeting (called by the CBO) including SOs to ensure accountability on all sides; and

• Making use of Local Level Monitoring (coordinated by the FIRM) through the CBO and other feedback coming form partner and SOs to make course corrections." 

 

[To contribute to this conference, send your message to [log in to unmask] For further information, see http://www.fao.org/nr/research-extension-systems/res-home/news/detail/en/c/264776/  



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