Professionalisation of family farming

10 February 2016. CTA has recently co-published with ISF Cameroon a book aimed at supporting development of the farming family sector.

Professionalisation of family farming – Tools for technical and organisational capacity-building of farmers’ organisations in sub-Saharan Africa
Author: Jean Merlin Etobe
CTA 2015, 54 pages

Goal 
The goal of this guide is to promote the professionalisation of farmers’ organisations through the implementation of technical and organisational capacity-building tools.

The top-down approaches giving donors, governments and their experts a monopoly on designing and decision-making are now called into question. They are now tentatively being replaced by bottom-up approaches, which allow the population to integrate their initiatives into the measures taken by the decision-makers.

We need to give priority to the stakeholders’ viewpoints and bottom-up approaches. But the smooth transition from an administered development to a concerted development requires conditions that are not always present. While various professions try to join together in order to better protect their interests and e…ciently contribute to their country’s development, agricultural producers seem to be lagging behind. 

Their weak organisational capacities might be the cause of this delay. In order for farmers to be recognised as stakeholders in their own right and for them to meet the high expectation of feeding the world by producing more and better and with less means, we must form strong, representative and professional farmers’ organisations.
Target audience 
This guide is mainly directed at the various stakeholders of rural development in sub-Saharan Africa. They are mainly:

• members of producer organisations, cooperatives, village associations, economic interest groups, common interest groups, etc. 
• executives and development workers in rural development projects and programmes 
• leaders of the farming world 
• farm schools students and pupils; 
• anyone who wants to create a farmers’ organisation within a rural community.