AMEA - Advancing professional farmer organizations

20 March 2018. Washington D.C. AMEA - Advancing professional farmer organizations embarked on its journey to facilitate the development of the global definition for professional farmer organizations, AMEA has organized a workshop on to actively engage stakeholders in the process. The workshop was hosted by one of AMEA’s Founding Partners, the International Finance Corporation (IFC).

This event was part of a series of regional engagements with the aim to introduce the International Workshop Agreement (IWA) process led by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to stakeholders in the regions and present the current thinking on the core capacities and characteristics that define a professional farmer organization.

The Washington workshop brought together a diverse group of stakeholders working in the field of agriculture and actively engaged in the commercialization of smallholders’ produce, capacity-building, and the development of farmer organizations around the globe.

One of the key take-aways of the workshop was that the collective effort put into uplifting smallholder farmers is costly but crucial and it is better to bring a solution then excluding these farmers from supply chains.

The next regional workshops that will provide a forum for engagement will take place in May 2018 in Kampala, Addis Ababa and Bangkok.


The IWA global definition for professional farmer organizations will be available in January 2019.

Related:

On November 21st, 2017, AMEA certified a first group of high quality trainers for farmer organizations, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

​The purpose of the trainer certification is to implement AMEA's Standardized Approach, which is a global standard that helps professionalize farmers and their organizations. AMEA aims to build a roster of highly qualified trainers in Ethiopia and other parts of the world, who are capable of transferring knowledge and delivering training services under the Agribusiness Leadership Program (ALP) curriculum to farmer organizations in different sectors.

AMEA is aiming to expand the trainer certification to other training curricula delivering on the core capacities of professional farmer organizations, and to the business coaching function in the next few years. A common pool of AMEA certified trainers is created for the members of the AMEA Alliance.