Farmers on the move
Activity report 2009

• Prologue
• Introduction
• Achievements
• Advisory Services
• Projects: the building blocks
• FFP: Funding & Expenditure
• Conclusions and recommendations
• Download Activity Report 2009

Introduction

The Farmers Fighting Poverty programme is reaching the end of its term. Already three years now, the lives of individual farmers all over the world are being touched upon through this programme and the wide variety of activities implemented. With still one year to go, the targets are on their way to be met and the results achieved are promising.

We are on track with the main targets of almost all work areas. This is a good result. But we have to remember that due to the lack of programme funding in 2010 and the ensuing lack funds for projects, we have to be realistic about the perspectives. Even so, after three years most of the work area targets have been reached or are likely to be reached before the programme ends. In work area 14 (gender) this is done by mainstreaming women’s participation in all projects. This has led to a spectacular result right from the first year when female participation was already over the 30% target set for the last year. In 2009 women represented a share of almost 40% of all participants. In general, the total participation in the programme activities was already 60% higher by 2009 than originally envisaged. Over 4 million participants have been registered within the projects of the first three years, where 2.7 million was expected over four years.

Our expenditure is partly following the envisaged geographical pattern: in 2009, 65,3% of spending was allocated to projects in Africa, well above the 60% aimed for at the start of the programme. 23% of project costs was allocated to gender equality, which is slightly more than in 2008.

In terms of organisations strengthening (the axis of our work), we witnessed a spectacular increase in membership of farmers organisations, particularly in Africa – which is very important for their representativity. Also, the financial dependency of the farmers’ organisations that participate in the Farmers Fighting Poverty programme is decreasing.

In this year’s report we put emphasis on achievements, taking the reader from there to our activities (advisory services and projects) and inputs (financial means). More than in previous years we wrote the report reflecting activities of all agri-agencies united under AgriCord (for a presentation of all agri-agencies, please have a look at Annex 6). However, since the report is composed by Agriterra as main informant of the back donor, the Dutch government, the document at times takes the examples of Agriterra to illustrate activities and results. We recommend to also consult the AgriCord activity report 2010 and Evidence on Impact 2010, also produced by AgriCord. The first one, provides more details on the basic aspects of the programme, like which projects were implemented in which work area. The second document elaborated on the issue of the evidence gathered from stories and evaluations of the impact of our work. The three together provide the full picture of what we want to show: the investment is paying off. Farmers’ organisations are rightly targeted in development cooperation and we hope that our plea for more direct funding of these associations is responded to by governments and cooperation agencies.