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

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Wed, 10 Dec 2014 09:13:55 +0100
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I am Rob Sacco, Principal of the Nyahode Union Sustainable Agriculture College, which is a subsidiary of the Nyahode Union Community Trust Technical College in Chimanimani, in the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe.



We have thirty years of experience in extension work in rural communities in the Eastern Highlands and further afield. Every time we think we have a handle on the work, different deeper problems emerge, and we and the communities go back to scratching our heads. 



We have seen the limitations of short-term, technology transfer, donor-driven extension, which all too often meets the needs of the donor and only incidentally of the community as a whole or the needs of the smallholder farmer families themselves.



We have seen the limitations in State extension systems, where the focus is necessarily on 'increasing and diversifying production of food and industrial crops', to feed the cities and the industries, but which miss the actual needs and aspirations of the smallholder farmers, who strive to meet their family needs, to establish and defend their own dignity and sustainability.



We have seen that even in the most participatory process, local elites invariably emerge, grab control of the community project, use and abuse it, run it into the ground, and then walk away from it.



We have seen how colonisation not only stripped the land off the colonised peasantry, but it stripped them of them their culture, their identity, their seed base, their traditional nutrition, and perhaps most of all, much of their organisational tradition and capacity.



When people have been reduced to having almost nothing, as we have seen, what little is offered is grabbed indiscriminately, for immediate gratification, such as it may be, with little focus on deferred gratification.



We have come to recognise the importance of 'life-long commitment' from rural activists and facilitators. And we are seeing now that we face a generational problem, as those deeper elements of culture and organisation take time to evolve and develop in a community.



Currently we have evolved accredited Post O-Level, National Foundation Certificate syllabuses in Agro-Ecology/Sustainable Agriculture for young adults in rural communities to gain in-depth knowledge in 'Integrated Land Use Design-Water', and 'Integrated Land Use Design-Soil'. Now we are developing the next layer, a National Certificate in 'Participatory Methods'. The aim is to equip young adults from within their own communities with agro-ecological knowledge, each trainee building a 'model agro-ecology model' at his or her own homestead, a grain of developmental yeast trying in this way to evolve an extension system that works from the ground up, reflecting the real and ongoing interest of the smallholder farmers themselves.



Rob Sacco, 

Nyahode Union Sustainable Agriculture College, 

Post Office Box 9, 

Chimanimani,

Zimbabwe

e-mail: robsacco9 (at) gmail.com



[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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