This document discusses farmer organizations and demand-driven extension. It defines farmer organizations as having membership, a purpose, and organizational structure to support members' interests. The document explores working with farmer groups to strengthen rural development and influence on advisory services depends on investment type. It reviews factors that influence farmer organizations and how different investment types in rural advisory services affect farmer empowerment, self-reliance, and demand-driven extension. The document concludes that supporting farmer organizations requires addressing functional barriers, understanding evolving group needs, and preparing for group-based approaches to be effective.

1. Farmer Organizations and
Demand-Driven Extension
Brent M. Simpson
Senior Agricultural
Officer, Investment
Center, FAO
June 4, 2015
MEAS Symposium
“Strengthening
the Role of
Farmer-to-Farmer
Extension and
Farmer
Organizations in
Extension”

2. Farmer Organizations: A definition
FOs: have a defined membership, a purpose for assembling and
organizational structure established to support members in
pursuing their individual and collective interests.
One "essential function is to organize relations with the external
world,” to mediate between members and “…others who act in
their economic, institutional, and political environment.” (Haubert
and Bey, 1995)

3. Exploring Farmer Organizations in
Demand-Driven Extension
Two assumptions:
• Working with farmer groups is essential in
strengthening farmers’ capacities to engage in a
wide range of rural development activities,
markets and policy formulation;
• The type of investments in rural advisory services
(RAS) influences not only the services available
but groups’ capacity to make effective demands
on service providers.

4. Review Outline
Regulatory and Organizational Conditions
– Constitutional and regulatory frameworks
– Group’s origins
– Levels of organization
Decentralization of Government
Organizational Concerns
– Problem identification and resolution
– Organization, membership and homogeneity
– Education and literacy
– Leadership and management
– Business and financial management
Policies/Strategies

5. Review Outline
Farm Types
– Commercial
– Mixed-farming
– Subsistence-oriented
Investments in RAS
– Contractual/financial
– Project/technology-based
– Process/social

6. RAS Investment Type & Farmer
Organization Assets
Types of
Investments
Member-
ship
Financial Human/Pro
blem
Solving
Leadership Social/Netw
orking
Contractual/
Financial
Project/Tech
nology
Process/Soci
al

7. Investment Types and Farmer
Empowerment and Demand Driven RAS
Types of
Investments
Self-Reliance Provisioning/Ac
cess to RAS
Accountability
&
Responsiveness
Opportunities
to Influence
Policy
Contractual/Fina
ncial
Project/Technol
ogy
Process/Social

8. Going Forward
• Functional barriers to farmer organization development
must be correctly identified and addressed. Failure to do
so will meet with limited success, and more likely result in
outright failure in achieving enduring impact.
• Groups themselves, as well as their needs, evolve.
Evidence does not support the assumption that, once
formed and functioning, groups will independently meet
all of their future requirements.
• In supporting market-oriented RAS efforts, the market for
which farmers are producing and a viable business model
for accessing this market must be understood, as well as
the group’s relation to others within the value chain. It
cannot be assumed that producer groups already
understand their opportunities and functioning of their
selected value chains.

9. Going Forward
• Farmer groups are not uniform, one-dimensional entities, and
treating them as such trivializes their integrity and invariably
results in mismatches between outsiders’ expectations and
group members’ interests and needs.
• Establishing and maintaining group autonomy to define and
pursue the group’s own development goals is critical. For the
sake of expediency, development interventions where
intermediaries insert their objectives and functionally occupy
critical roles can create a situation in which groups begin
serving outsiders’ interests and will likely fail to fill the
operational gaps when external assistance is removed.
• Labelling as “demand-driven” those interventions in which
farmer organization inputs ultimately have little impact on
prioritization, or in which they are effectively used to validate
external interests, is disingenuous and unlikely to lead to
enduring contributions by the organizations in shaping
outcomes.

10. Going Forward
• In the context where groups themselves must ensure their
own RAS needs to remain viable, experience shows that
this is best achieved where the costs of RAS can be
appropriately blended with other essential services of
group functioning.
• The growing trend of merging farmer organization
development efforts with farmer-to-farmer service
provisioning requires careful consideration, especially
where a demand-driven approach is being used.
• In working with groups, RAS initiatives must prepare for
the time and skills needed for group-based approaches to
take hold and prosper. Seemingly obvious, this rule is
violated in more instances than not.

11. MEAS Best Practice Discussion Paper 5
Bingen, R.J. and B.M. Simpson. 2015. Farmer
Organizations and Modernizing Extension and
Advisory Services: A framework and reflection on
Cases from Sub-Saharan Africa. MEAS Discussion
Paper 5. Champaign-Urbana, Ill: University of Illinois.

12. Disclaimer
This presentation was made possible by the generous support of the American
people through the United States Agency for International Development, USAID. The
contents are the responsibility of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the
views of USAID or the United States Government.