Getting to the Roots of Farmer Groups

“Why?… Why?… Why?…”

It is a simple yet captivating question that District Directors of Agriculture (DDAs) were asking as they dug deep to explore the issues and difficulties in creating, forming, managing, and strengthening farmer groups in northern Ghana during the second session of the DDA Leadership and Management Fellowship with Engineers Without Borders (EWB) Canada.

Often, people at higher levels of organizations working in developing countries are good at recognizing the main issues and contributing to ideas and projects that can address them on the ground, but it often remains challenging to really understand and get to the root of an issue and actually address it effectively. It takes different types of leaders with different experiences to put something together that will have a positive impact.

In the Northern Region and Upper East Region, agriculture extension agents (AEAs) have been encouraged to form groups of farmers by higher levels of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA) so that, for instance, they can more efficiently disseminate technical agricultural information, link farmers to financial institutions and access credit on the basis that one or another would act as collateral, or benefit from donor projects and handouts based on a common interest or perceived need; however, the process of forming and managing strong reliable farmer groups has been incredibly challenging for AEAs, which is why DDAs came together to analyze the problem, dig deep, and come out with some practical solutions to the challenges.

This part of the fellowship was extra visual – projector, flip charts, handouts, diagrams… the whole works, and they loved it! We started exploring the issue of farmers only joining farmer groups to get loans, as well as the implications, and the DDAs were encouraged to dig deeper by asking “why” and “why” again in order to get to a point where they could identify the root causes that could be addressed. As the discussion progressed, other issues linked in.

One of the biggest issues that MoFA staff observe within farmer groups is that of low cohesiveness, it’s central to why they don’t function well, which is linked to the fact that farmers often only come together to form a group with the hope of getting a loan (which in the rare cases are allocated, are not repaid), and this could likely be due to the fact that farmer groups are not well sensitized or informed about why it’s a good idea to come together because farmer groups are created in a rush due to project pressures, or because extension agents should in theory be forming and registering groups on an ongoing basis but are too constrained by other demands to do this work effectively, or because farmer groups should be formed around a specific market so that they work well on a common interest and link to profitable buyers but commodity chains aren’t well developed, and so on…It’s complicated!

It seems DDAs and staff don’t ask enough “why” type of questions and aren’t pushed to be critical of the activities they’re assigned to accomplish. The hierarchal culture, which was mentioned in Providing feedback: small small culture change in MoFA, can also contribute in a way to the poor formation and management of farmer groups and disappointing payback of loans. EWB staff have worked determinedly at the field level but we notice that management is an issue – it’s the lynch pin of district performance. The DDAs and the District Agricultural Officers (DAOs) work on supervising and monitoring AEAs primarily from their offices, but they recognize that they could be doing this more creatively and in the field which would motivate the AEAs to work through the challenges they’re facing with the farmer groups – this was among other ideas that DDAs came up with as they narrowed their analyses down to some root causes that they were most interested in addressing, some key recommendations, and some activities they were going to try in their districts. Other noteworthy ideas involved being more creative to get loans repaid, and orienting farmer group development more towards market opportunities (i.e. less project/loan oriented).

We’ll be following up with DDAs to see how their ability to understand the issues with farmer groups has changed as well as how they work with their staff to test out some of their ideas and adjust them appropriately. EWB is also playing a role in the way we support and provide on-the-job training for AEAs to use the Agriculture as a Business curriculum which helps them develop strong farmer groups and prepare farmers to successfully manage credit and access improved markets. But with more and more projects being implemented through MoFA that require strong farmer groups, we also need to influence and convince donors and MoFA National that for projects to succeed, they need to give more time to farmer group development, they need to track development, and they need to incentivize banks and MoFA staff to work together and select districts based not only on geographical factors or random selection but on district capacity and farmer group strength.

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