People’s Participation Programme (PPP)

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Agriterra is working on a new Solution, called People’s Participation Programme (PPP). PPP was originally developed by the FAO. Currently, Agriterra aims to use the Peoples Participation Programme in the context of rural membership organisations. The programme takes the rural poor and their development perspectives as a starting point. PPP aims to empower disadvantaged rural poor people through group formation and common action.

Some key elements of the PPP are:
-    focus on the rural poor
-    small homogeneous self-help groups.
-    local implementing agencies, in our case the farmers’ organisation
-    group promoters (GP), the central pivot of the PPP system: through participatory methods GPs support self-help groups in reinforcing group performance for economic activities and lobbying to external institutions.
-    The poor are organised around income-generating activities in order to build up and diversify their economic base.
-    Group saving serve to attract additional credit and to build up groups’ capital base. Savings serve as a condition to get access to financing.
-    Financing of economic activities can be done by creating access to group credit
-    Capacity building of the group members is essential, not only in technical skills but also on self-organisation and self-confidence creation (empowerment).
-    Self-reliance is stressed through training, savings mobilization and consolidation of groups in (existing) self-governing umbrella organisations serving wider interests.

Expected results
At individual farmers’ level:
-    Increased economic activities
-    Higher net family income
-    Increased employment
-    Higher rates of saving
-    Acquisition of new skills and attitudes
-    Introduction in RPO and benefiting from relation of the union with governmental and external institutions

For the RPO:
-    PPP will broaden and consolidate their membership base
-    PPP will empower their members economically and socially
-    PPP is an appropriate approach to reach specific groups as women and youth
-    PPP offers possibilities for internal strengthening of learning capacities through the use of farmer-group-promoters.
-    PPP will promote economic activities at local levels
-    Selection of local farm leaders as group promoters enhances the sustainability of the efforts
-    Building on the organisational experience of the union
-    Using the training programmes and capacities of the union, ensuring training that corresponds to the accepted cultural standards of the farmers
-    Involvement of self help groups in advocacy activities of RPO’s.

In a while the Solution will be published on our website www.agriterra.org. Would you like more information about this Solution, please send an email to agriterra@agriterra.org