Roadmap: Farmer to Farmer Effective Extension Services Through Community Learning Centers

ROADMAP: FARMER TO FARMER EFFECTIVE EXTENSION SERVICES THROUGH COMMUNITY LEARNING CENTERS – ROUTASIA PADEE 2016

ROADMAP: FARMER TO FARMER EFFECTIVE EXTENSION SERVICES THROUGH COMMUNITY LEARNING CENTERS – ROUTASIA PADEE 2016

1. BACKROUND OF THE COMUMUNITY LEARNING CENTERS PORJECT IN CAMBODIA 2

2. FARMER TO FARMER EXTENSION SERVICES 3

2.1. LOCAL CHAMPIONS AND CLC MODEL IN CAMBODIA 7

2.2. ACTORS OF LOCAL CHAMPIONS SYSTEM 13

2.3. LOCAL CHAMPIONS SYSTEM TOWARDS SUSTAINABIIITLY 15

3. ROADMAP OF LOCAL CHAMPIONS SYSTEM 19

3.1. GOALS, OBJECTIVES RESULTS, ACTIVTIES AND PRODUCTS OF LOCAL CHAMPIONS SYSTEM IN CAMBODIA 20

4. LOCAL CHAMPIONS ANALYSIS 24

5. LOCAL CHAMPIONS ROADMAP-INTERVENTIONS SUGGESTED 34

6. LOCAL CHAMPIONS ROADMAP 38

7. IMPLEMENTATION PHASES 55

8. CONCLUSIONS 56

ANNEX I. MAP OF ACTORS 59

ANNEX II: ACRONYMS 68

1.  BACKROUND OF THE COMUMUNITY LEARNING CENTERS PORJECT IN CAMBODIA

Cambodia is a tropical agrarian country with a population of 14.8 Million (2012) with more than 70% of population involved in agriculture related activities, the sector contributes to 27.5% of their GDP. It is also still one of the poorest countries with almost 4.8million poor people, of which 90% are in rural areas and the majority of them depend on agriculture activities. Most of them are small-scale farmers practicing agriculture at subsistence level and using traditional methods with low levels of productivity. Furthermore, they are constantly looking for complementary income generating activities, mainly temporary and poorly paid.

Thus, the need to improve the level of education in rural area to increase productivity is one of the major challenges of the country. The pathways that the Royal Government of Cambodia (RGC) is taking to address this issue are: increasing added value in the sector, promoting agricultural value chain responsiveness to the market demand and regional and global competition, enhancing agricultural productivity, diversification, and commercialization; promoting livestock farming and aquaculture as well as sustainable forestry and fisheries resources management; strengthening institutional capacity, enhancing efficiency of support services, and developing human resources in the agricultural sector.

Agriculture extension services aim to responding to this challenge. Rural extension services were established in Cambodia before the1970s by transferring technology to farmers in rural areas including rice, vegetables and livestock. During the war period (1975-1979) the extension services were shut down until 1980, when the Ministry of Agriculture tried to encourage farmers to return on extension service activities through radio and TV program scripts, booklets and posters, but it was only until 1988 when the extension work restarted with the support of the Australian Catholic Relief (ACR). In 1995, the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fishery (MAFF) created the Department of Technique, Economic and Extension under Cabinet of Ministry, responsible for agricultural extension, today known as the Department of Agriculture Extension (DAE) under the General Directorate of Agriculture (GDA). Since then, several projects and organizations have contributed to increase and improve the extension services in Cambodia.

In 2013 the Project of Agricultural Development and Economic Empowerment (PADEE), financed by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and implemented by MAFF started its operations with the main goal of improving the livelihood of poor rural people in 5 Provinces: Kampot, Kandal, Prey Veng, Svay Rieng and Takeo, benefiting around 90,000 rural households. The objective of the project is to diversify the sources of income of rural households living in poverty in the selected provinces, improving agricultural productivity, access to financial services and access to technology and markets. Those objectives needed the provision of rural extension services that increase the productivity of small farmers.

On the other hand, the international NGO PROCASUR was simultaneously implementing the ROUTASIA program co-financed by IFAD. ROUTASIA aimed to strengthen knowledge by sharing and scaling up sustainable innovations, which are enhanced by stakeholders of IFAD funded projects to adopt and scale up better practices and innovations to reduce poverty.

The demand of innovative methodologies to transfer knowledge and good practices to farmers of PADEE and other MAFF projects met the experience on knowledge management of PROCASUR. This allows designing and preparing a farmers training program together. In addition, it was possible to scale up knowledge and share good practice processes among PADEE beneficiaries in an innovative way. The innovation in rural extension services is particularly important in the current Cambodian debate, where scholars and authorities are discussing the changes of rural extension policies and strategies acknowledging many problems to face such as limited supporting system and regulations, lack of human resources, funding, techniques and new technology, appropriate technology package, agricultural extension materials, and facilitation skills.[1]

2.  FARMER TO FARMER EXTENSION SERVICES

The public sector, represented primarily by MAFF and other State and local government agencies are responsible to provide extension of rural services in Cambodia. Those services are adapting to the changing context and the increasing importance of non-State extension providers. In that scenario, Local Champions (LCs) have been an alternative system to address these issues by transforming exceptional farmers into rural extension service providers for other farmers and by giving them the tools to transfer knowledge and good practices and to create networks with other actors that could help them to fulfill this task. PADEE project is one of the principal actors that have been working on this by giving farmers access to financial services, technology and markets through innovation in capacity building, applied trainings and small rural business development.

PROCASUR started engaging with PADEE on 2013 providing innovation in capacity building used by PROCASUR around the world: Learning Routes (LR). A Learning Route is a capacity building strategy that allows farmers to travel and meet other farmers in different places with similar productive activities. This permits the farmers to learn from each other’s experiences and best practices, exchange knowledge, identify potentially useful innovations and successfully adapt and apply them to their own organization and context. In 2013, a group of 23 PADEE beneficiaries from the Improved Group Revolving Funds (IGRF) from PADEE decided to facilitate knowledge transfer in agriculture, gender and nutrition, financial literacy and to grant access to credit schemes to invest in agricultural production and Common Interest Groups (CIG) to poor people. The group attended the first Learning Route of the project in Thailand to learn about organic agriculture techniques and best practices. In 2014 and 2015, another PADEE beneficiaries group went to other Learning Routes related to water management, small irrigation system, post-harvesting and packaging process in Vietnam and Thailand.

The Learning Routes teach farmers new knowledge and good practice and expose them to new methodologies to gain knowledge and good practices. One of the most important ones was the Community Learning Centre (CLC) in Thailand. A Community Learning Centre provides non-formal education activities in order to improve the quality of Thai people’s lives operated by local people for local people. Among the learning activities are the ones related to farmers’ business activities such as agriculture techniques, farm management, financial literacy, processing methods and others given by very successful farmers according to the context and needs.[2]

The CLCs of Thailand combined with the need of an innovative system to transfer knowledge and best practices more effectively and sustainably and to be able to scale up knowledge and good practices to more farmers, created a new system of rural extension services. The principal idea was to establish CLCs where trained farmers could give together rural extension services to other farmers, sharing knowledge and good practices successfully learnt and adopted. This task needs the best farmers as implementers. Therefore, the first stage was to select the best ones with appropriate criteria such as experience, interest on sharing knowledge, results on adopting techniques among others.

Using and supporting the best farmers evokes also a concept PROCASUR is using in several countries called Local Talents or Local Champions system. Procasur adapted and transferred the CLC Model, already tested in other regions of the world like Latin America, to the Cambodian context and needs.

Local Champions (LCs) are men and women with outstanding capabilities, skills, relevant knowledge and experience on production and/or social processes that lead actions, ideas and innovations in rural areas. They are selected according to several criteria that assure the participation of the best farmers. After which they are part of a process of several trainings and tasks defined by PROCASUR and PADEE that transform them from Model Farmers to Local Champions.

The Local Champions system consists on the following steps:

1)  Identification of potential farmers to become Local Champions through specific criteria such as experience, availability and willingness to participate in trainings and to train others, success on their agriculture activities, etc.

2)  Register their information to obtain a database of Local Champions related to their agriculture activities, trainings (potential) offer, plans, training needs among others.

3)  Profile of their principal characteristics in order to disseminate their information (related to their area of expertise, value chain, trainings and experience as trainers, place of action, etc.) and contact them with potential partners and clients according their characteristics.

4)  Train them in agriculture techniques according to their context, activity, management, teaching and marketing skills.

5)  Certify them as Local Champions to allow them to be recognized and to obtain more market opportunities and options. This enables them to support other farmers through projects or any organization related to rural extension services.

6)  Support them to become part of networks of institutions related to rural extension services and create local networks with farmers to give them training and technical support and explore market opportunities together to sell their agriculture products in better conditions.

7)  Evaluate the success of LCs as successful farmers in their productive activities, as trainers and as leaders of their community.

8)  Follow up LCs activities to support their sustainability.

The following roadmap analyzes the actual situation in Cambodia on every step for this task; the problems and potential solutions faced so far and propose steps to follow and improvements to create sustainable CLCs as an effective rural extension service.

2.1.  LOCAL CHAMPIONS AND CLC MODEL IN CAMBODIA

The main idea to adapt Local Champions system to Cambodia was to scale up the effect of Local Champions developing more Local Champions and CLCs to scale up the learning process they have been involved in with the rest of their community and other provinces by gaining extra income for them and the CLC. The CLC reunites LCs from a territory (District) to provide extension services to farmers, share information and learn together. It is also a space to obtain market information, network with other actors, solve problems as well as plan and execute ways to implement their knowledge and good practices in different ways to improve the livelihood of farmers from the community.

The process to develop Local Champions and Community Learning Centre has been designed and changed several times according to the outcomes, following a “learning by doing” process. As a result, the first generation of LCs has received a lot of training and support to become an example and a reference point for future generations. The following LCs generations are not going to receive as much training but the training they will receive is going to be more accurate and optimal. Today, the first generation is almost ready to be independent and provide rural extension services by themselves.

The first generation of Local Champions development could be described as: A first step, the first generation of Local Champions received training on organic agriculture techniques through Learning Route in Thailand and other training as an answer to intensive chemical agriculture. For this objective, local champions received training in organic production, post-harvesting techniques and access to markets. Today, Local Champions from the five Provinces of PADEE[3] have changed to organic farming methods and have increased their income by reducing production costs with new techniques, diversifying crops and cooperating amongst each other with a market-oriented approach. As a result, the first generation of Local Champions is specialized in organic agriculture techniques successfully adopted in their farms.

As a next step, Local Champions were trained on teaching skills to transfer their knowledge and good practices. Afterwards, they were trained and supported to create a Community Learning Centre. Today there is one CLC for each of the five Provinces of PADEE project. The next step was for them to start training other farmers as part of the scale up process of the LCs system on each CLC. They had also taken part on a Trainer of Trainers (ToTs) and other training activities from PROCASUR and PADEE to develop their CLCs tools such as marketing, teaching and management tools. Finally, they have supported the group of people they trained to organize Farmer Congresses on their District to share and solve problems of farmers from their Community. This is the current point of actual Local Champions. Even if they still need support on implementing activities on CLCs by themselves and attracting clients, they already have obtained significant benefits from their activities such as income increase, community recognition, and better access to markets training for farmers.

The second generation of Local Champions is now in the training process. A first group of them has been trained by Local Champions in the CLCs on organic agriculture techniques and though participation of this training they have become Model Farmers. Model Farmers have already organized their first event coached by Local Champions: Farmer Congress. A Farmer Congress is a learning event for 50 to 80 farmers around the community of one District were the organizers are Model Farmers (4), who share their experience and knowledge with the participants and try to help them to solve problems. After the Farmer Congress only the best ones will be selected to go to next phase, becoming Outstanding Farmers (OF) participating in a ToT and several training activities to create their CLC and finally become Local Champions.

The previous paragraph describes the process to become a Local Champion. The following graphics summarize the process of the first and following generations of Local Champions.

FIRST GENERATION OF LOCAL CHAMPIONS OF IN CAMBODIA