Who Speaks for the Farmers? Who Listens?

Participants say the TrustAfrica-led initiative is critical in light of the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) and the 2003 Maputo Declaration, in which the heads of state from 53 African nations pledged to increase public investment in agriculture by a minimum of 10 percent of their national budgets. “It’s high time that civil society, and particularly small-scale farmers, get more involved in these processes,” said Joe Mzinga, regional coordinator of the Eastern and Southern Africa small-scale Farmers’ Forum (ESAFF), a network of smallholder farmers. “The time to engage is now!”

Yesterday George Osei-Bimpeh of SEND–Ghana and TrustAfrica’s Tendai Murisa led discussions on governance and public policy making as well as the politics of agriculture. Ruby Quantson of the Institute for Democratic Governance (IDEG) in Ghana led a session on public deliberation and dialogue for public policy engagement.

In one of the opening exercises, participants were asked to take turns sitting in the same chair in a different way, while stating their hopes for the workshop.

Several participants also put together a skit about civil society advocates trying to explain the needs and concerns of small-scale farmers to a government minister. The sketch cleverly reflected not only the dismissive attitude that many government officials hold about civil society, but also the vulnerability of advocacy organizations that are not well connected with a grassroots constituency. Groups that claim to speak for farmers or on their behalf have considerably less credibility and traction than those that work with farmers and seek to amplify their voices.

Today, Meleney Tembo, a trainer from the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (IDASA), led a session on lobbying and advocacy for smallholder organizations. Participants reflected on how to define long-term goals as well as measurable, achievable shorter-term objectives. In one exercise, participants broke into small groups to place in the best order various activities involved in conducting public advocacy.

To guide the weeklong session, TrustAfrica commissioned the development of a 140-page training manual by IDEG, based in Accra, Ghana. We’ll be posting that soon on our website. Meanwhile, we’re posting photos of the event on our Picasa site.