My name is Violet Nyando, from Kenya. I work as an External Relations, Policy and Lobby officer at the Kenya National Farmers Federation (KENAFF), an Apex organization that represents the interest of all farmers in Kenya. Our core mandate is to engage with our membership in order to clearly articulate issues/concerns affecting the farming community and engaging in relevant dialogue processes with the right authorities to seek redress on the same. My training background is in agricultural extension and agricultural and rural innovations, and I believe this topic under discussion is timely and relevant particularly with regard to transforming the smallholder farm sector. 

I want to contribute towards question 4.3 from the conference background document which asks "What role can producer organizations play in tailoring rural advisory services for family farms?"

Agriculture is the main economic activity for the majority of the people in Kenya and from literature review and international debates, the same scenario applies to most of the African countries. Traditionally, capital, land, labour, management/entrepreneurship were considered to be the critical factors of production that one needed to have to engage in any agribusiness. However, one critical factor of production has been added to the list and this factor is knowledge. For any business to thrive in this century, knowledge has become key. Entrepreneurs require relevant, updated and real time information on technologies, innovations, markets and markets trends, consumer demands/needs, policy requirements and regulations etc.

The Kenya National Farmers Federation (KENAFF), as an apex organization for all Kenyan farmers, realized this critical component of production as being important if it wants its members to really transform the agricultural sector. Most of our members fall in category 2 and 3 as described in the conference background document. These groups of farmers are characterized by low levels of production. To help our members benefit from rural advisory services, the federation is promoting a farmer business model dubbed producer business model to help undertake targeted interventions that will help the membership. This model allows farmers to be organised along a specific value chain making it easy to carry out targeted extension and advisory services with the membership. Our approach is in such a way that we engage farmers in a prioritized value chain through the following steps:

1. We mobilize, sensitize and recruit our membership into Common Interest Groups (CIGs) along specific value chains
2. These groups are then consolidated (at least 10 CIGs each with a membership of between 20-30 farm families) to form a legalized producer business group
3. We undertake a needs assessment in terms of establishing the training needs gaps and other knowledge gaps that the groups have and organize to deliver these trainings as a federation and in collaboration with other stakeholders
4. These trainings/capacity building processes involve a lot of extension work and also advisory services and they are usually tailored towards improving the operation efficiency of that specific value chain that our farmers are engaged in.
5. We help establish and sustain mutually beneficial linkages between our membership and other value chain actors for purposes of enhancing sustainability
6. In the process of engaging with our membership, we  also engage them in active policy debates especially with regard to getting the real issues affecting them. These issues are then packaged and processed through validation and discussed with the relevant authorities

NB - As a federation we have embraced the inclusivity principles with regard to human rights based approach and gender inclusiveness in our interventions. In this way we are able to incorporate both the men, women, the youth male, youth female and also special groups in the societies.

Nyando V. Violet,
Kenya National Farmers' Federation,
P.O Box 43148-00100,
Nairobi
Kenya
Tel: +254-20-21866337/2180608, +254-723-903957
Fax: +254-20-2180687
Office Email: farmers (at) kenaff.org
Mobile: +254-720 801429, +254-736-550510
Email: nyandov (at) yahoo.com ; nyandov (at) gmail.com ; nyandoviolet (at) kenaff.org

[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/  

########################################################################

To unsubscribe from the RAS-L list, click the following link:
https://listserv.fao.org/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=RAS-L&A=1