Monday, April 7, 2014

Building a strong farmers’ organisation

It is in the spirit of knowledge sharing that I am passing these points to the readers. Most of these ideas were obtained from an agricultural journalists’ conference hosted by Eastern Africa Farmers Federation in Nairobi, Kenya, about two weeks ago in which your columnist was a participant.
A farmer organisation should not be dependent on donor funding but rather on members contribution with as little as 10 per cent coming from donors or government.
It should promote gender equity and democracy in its leadership and all activities.
It should endeavour to promote its members from individual subsistence farming to entreneurship, value addition, and higher levels on the value chain.
A farmer organisation should encourage proactive communication and ensure members are well informed about new developments, prices, markets, and challenges, if any. There should be information flow and experience sharing between members.
The organisations should be specific and commodity based instead of being generalised.
Members should avoid forming cliques that are opposed to resolutions made in general meetings. As much as possible, a farmers’ organisation should stick to its constitution and by-laws. The members should respect elected leaders and technical staff; in the event of any crisis or conflict, they should strive to sort them out without outside intervention.
All members should meet their obligations such as timely payment of subscriptions or loan installments, and reporting punctually for meetings.
Farmer organisations should promote a team culture, honesty, and good governance and should abhor divisions and discrimination based on political and religious affiliation or ethnicity.
The leaders should be transparent and accountable to the members, and should organise regular meetings, where everybody is given equal opportunity to express their views about any issues concerning their organisation.
The leaders should be ready to let others take over leadership when their term expires

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