Shaun Ferris

What farmers want: collective capacity for sustainable entrepreneurship

Expanding equitable access to product markets for millions of poor farmers is of critical importance to the development of sustainable rural livelihoods in developing countries. This paper addresses the question of how to improve strategies for improving their capacity to access dynamic markets on a large scale. Skill formation receives little attention in the current debate about how to overcome wealth-differentiated barriers to market entry in poor rural societies. Public investment in skill development for the rural poor fails to meet actual livelihood skill needs. By using a methodology to study farmer groups in three countries that built theory “from the bottom up,” this papers research identified an unmet, grass-roots demand in farmer groups for combining five skill sets that in combination, represent capacity for sustainable entrepreneurship. Not only is the demand for a broader approach to capacity development emerging out of groups of poor farmers, the combined skills are collective attributes formed and exercised by farmer groups that are successfully delivering benefits to their members. The paper concludes that what poor farmers want is the combination of these five capabilities and argues that a more comprehensive redefinition of skills and learning for the rural poor is needed that responds to this demand.

Identifying Market Opportunities for Urban and Peri-Urban Farmers in Kampala

Rapid urbanization in many Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries is an indicator of the ever-growing pace of structural transformation. Increasing urban population requires more services, the most basic being food. This increasing demand has led to recognition of the contribution of urban and peri-urban agriculture to providing food security, employment and income generation as well as productive management of idle or under-utilized resources. Statistics from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) indicate that approximately 800 million people are engaged in urban agriculture worldwide with the majority in Asian cities. Of these, 200 million are considered to be market-oriented producers, employing 150 million people full time (Smit et al. 1997).

Preparing Groups of Poor Farmers for Market Engagement: Five Key Skill Sets

This is the second of two chapters that present the case for a portfolio of basic skills to prepare poor farmers for market engagement. This type of skill formation receives little attention in the current debate about how to overcome wealth-differentiated barriers to market entry in poor societies. The chapter discusses the findings of a multi-country Study Tour of three countries, Uganda, India, and Bolivia, organized by the Catholic Relief Services (CRS), a relief and development agency, and the Rural Innovation Institute (RII) of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), an international research organization to explore how their support to farmer groups could be improved and expanded to reach more of the rural poor and prepare them for agro-enterprise development. The Study Tour discovered that a common feature of the farmer groups visited was a drive to acquire and combine five basic “skill sets” that even the poorest groups were incorporating. The observed skill sets were classified as follows: (1) group management; (2) financial skills (usually developed through participation in internal savings and lending groups); (3) marketing skills; (4) experimentation and innovation skills for accessing new technology; and (5) sustainable production and natural resource management skills. Most groups proactively sought to develop multiple skill sets even in the absence of external support for this purpose. Although no single skill set is new in and of itself, the novel discovery was the expressed demand by farmer groups to combine several skill sets. The Study Tour participants concluded that combining skill sets has considerable promise for improving current group development approaches and preparing farmer groups to engage with markets.

Editorial: Towards leaner and more effective value chain development

Value chain development (VCD) is a common term in today’s development lexicon1, where its use tends to conjure passionate ideas about how development programming can support smallholder participation in growing markets in the interest of economic growth, job creation, gender empowerment, and sustainable use of natural resources, among other goals. Since the early 2000s, Enterprise Development and Microfinance (EDM) has featured considerable debate on how to design market-oriented development interventions with smallholders, often based on positive experiences by a given NGO or project in a particular context. Early articles helped to put VCD on the development agenda, while advancing innovation in market-based project design and implementation. However, after more than a decade of it being firmly placed on the agenda, we still know relatively little about VCD. Apart from isolated case studies, the question of whether VCD has lived up to the expectations of smallholders, of the private sector, and of devel...