Mapping farmers’ organization

Buba KhanAfrica Advocacy OfficerActionAid International

Rationale• The rationale for the review and or mapping is to understand the

realities around the membership of regional farmer’s organization in ensuring effective representation and involvement of marginal smallholder women farmers in the organizational management and broader policy making processes

• It is also aimed at identifying priority institutional functioning challenges, extent of representation of such organizations by smallholder women farmers, governance and democratic control and autonomy of such organizations, technical and financial capacities, empowerment needs, and developing initiatives and strategies for enhancing women farmers’ participation in the empowerment and strengthening farmers’ organizations.

Objectives

• The overall objective of the study is to profile existing regional farmers’ organizations across Africa in terms of effectiveness and efficiency of delivering their mandates and to review the representation of the membership of select national farmer organization in terms of composite farmer typologies and policy interests and how they are reflected in structure, design and policy aspiration of their members.

The specific objectives are:

• To generate a comprehensive profile of sub-regional (ROPPA, ESAFF,EAFF,UMAGIRI,SACAU, etc) and their linkages with national farmers organization/commodity associations covering specific organizational data such as but not limited to a) basic organizational description (history and life; purpose; representation; national and international linkages and engagement; governance, organizational structure and management; b) gender and youth; c) functions and programmes;

• To analyze the architecture of national organization in light of the extent to which, and potential to entrench women smallholder farmers interests in terms of mission and vision, strategic direction, etc

• To identify gaps if any in the functions performed by the FOs with respect to empowerment of women farmers/members and whether or not the most marginalize groups are involved

• To assess effectiveness of FOs in performing identified functions against member expectations in general and in particular with respect to empowerment of women farmers and other/members;

• Recommend strategies for addressing identified priority farmer empowerment and organizational strengthening needs

Key Issues

• Inadequate women and youth representation• Capacity challenges (financial, technical• Governance structure and representation• Accountability and transparency to membership• Autonomy and independence• Meeting expectation of membership (widening

gaps)• Lack of information flow amongst farmers• The list is not exhaustive…..you name them

Moving forward

• Soliciting support to gather information• Finalization of study report by consultant• Validation of report• Sharing findings with key stakeholders • Implementation of key recommendations

from the report