Entries by Administrator

Forty-two year old farmer Dinar Chemjor has a message for the Kenyan Government: “We have the means to eliminate hunger and malnutrition, our challenge here is market access!"
Chemjor is a smallholder farmer and the mother of seven children from Emining, Kenya, a town in Nakuru County in the Rift Valley province. Her small farm is helping her family survive, despite not getting any help from the Government. For two hours every day, Chemjor and her fellow women farmers often undergo the physical and psychological stresses of looking for markets for their produce.

Nearby, in Ngata, 47-year-old Joyce Malelei, worries about land ownership. After the death of her husband, his elder brother quietly sold back to her a two-acre parcel of the land on which the couple had built their home, claiming that the land was still in his grandfather’s name.

“My worry is how widows will be food secure if we are excluded from our husbands’ land, when it has been inherited from our fathers-in-law,” she says angrily.
Joyce is appealing to the Government to fast track implementation of land laws to guarantee women land ownership through co-ownership and joint ownership.
These farmers are part of an advocacy program that attempts to mobilize a local and national movement of farmers’ organizations to develop policies that advance the best interests of farmers. The project, spearheaded by Jamaa Resource Initiatives and funded by TrustAfrica, raises awareness of injustices such as those faced by Chemjor and Malelei and encourages the government to take action.

The project consisted of six farmers’ forums which were used to raise awareness on what the Government is doing and what it is supposed to do to meet the priorities of the smallholder farmers. Kenya is one of six target countries of the Agriculture Development Project (the others being Ghana, Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi and Nigeria) which seeks to build an effective advocacy movement around agricultural development across the continent. The goal is to make national agricultural policies comply with the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Program or CAADP, agreed to by 53 African governments during the African Union summit in 2003.

For Kenya, the failure to adequately recognize women farmers is life threatening, slowing food production and poverty reduction rates in the country since women are key actors in Kenyan farming, constituting over half of the agricultural labor force and producing 70 per cent of food.
Despite that, there is no budget allocation specifically targeting women farmers.

According to the women farmers, inaccessibility to credit facilities, poor road networks, lack of equipment and irrigation facilities, and lack of storage facilities are some of the major challenges they face.

The case of Eastern and Southern Africa Small Scale Farmers Forum (ESAFF), August 2011 to August 2012

Introduction:

ESAFF is a small-scale farmer’s forum working in 13 countries in the Eastern and Southern Africa (ESA) Region. ESAFF is a relatively new organisation with a long history of struggle for space and recognition in regional policy processes. ESAFF was established during a parallel farmer’s conference at the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) held in Johannesburg, South Africa in 2002. ESAFF works to “Empower small scale farmers in eastern and southern Africa to influence development policies and promote ecological agriculture through capacity strengthening, research and networking”

ESAFF was awarded a grant worth USD 34,600 from TrustAfrica in mid-2011. The goal of the support was to strengthen the capacity of Small Scale Farmers Forums to hold States accountable in fulfilling and translating the Maputo Declaration and CAADP Compact for sustainable agriculture and food security in Eastern Africa. The geographical focus of the project was in three countries; Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.
Continue reading "Reflections on Advocating for Agricultural Development Project"

Dare Masate is part of SEND-GHANA’s Women in Agriculture Lobby Teams in the Kpandai District of the Northern region of Ghana. She is a proud nominee for the best female yam farmer in the Kpandai District for 2012.

“I owe my success to SEND,” stated Dare, a forty-three-year-old farmer and a mother of seven. Dare is just one of hundreds of women who are becoming successful in agriculture due to SEND-Ghana’s facilitation of engaging marginalized groups with district-level actors.

SEND-GHANA organized capacity building sessions to increase poor people’s access to opportunities and services in SEND-GHANA’s operational districts. Dare took part in the communication and advocacy skills training session organized for the District Citizen’s Monitoring Committee (DCMC) in Kpandai. She gained skills in advocacy at the district level; and engaged the District Agriculture Development Unit (DADU) in Kpandai for support and extension services for her soya beans farm.

“SEND-GHANA gave me information about government policies and opportunities for women farmers and I got motivated to engage the district agriculture officials for support....I was initially tilling one and half acres of soya beans for home consumption.”

In less than two years, Dare expanded her farms and cultivated more than ten acres of soya beans. She then contacted SEND-Ghana Eastern Corridor Livelihood Promotion Programme to help her access a market for her produce. She was linked with Savanna Farmers – a produce marketing company in the Northern Region - which readily assisted her sell her produce. She has scaled up the production of soya beans and has diversified to include yam. She is now able to provide the basic needs and pay the school fees of all her seven children who are at various levels of education.

“Two of my children are at the tertiary level, two are in senior high school, and the remaining three are in the basic level. I now pay all their fees and even have some money to save,” Dare noted.

Thanks for taking the time to check out our Impact page and read our latest publications in "Everybody's Talking." If you'd like to share your thoughts or start a discussion regarding what you have read, please feel free to do so, below. Alternatively, if you have specific questions regarding the research presented in the ICBE Research Fund reports, please let us know and we can put you in touch with the author directly. Again, thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts!