CAPACITY BUILDING OF FARMERS IN KENYA
Capacity building initiatives for farmers in Kenya are in the portfolio of the Ministry of Agriculture, includingirrigated agriculture. There have been some notable extension programmes over the years. For instance, theTraining and Visits (T&V) of the 1980s was an extension project funded by the World Bank and implemented in41 districts. It was meant to replace the tradition extension system inherited from the colonial government, whichhad failed to improve production in smallholder farming, as it was fraught with too much bureaucracy (Gautam,2000; Pickering, 1989). Under T&V, the concept of the model farmer was promoted, in which progressive farmerswere identified where experiments and demonstration plots would be set up on their farms. However, adoptionrates were disappointing, as the visiting farmers, for one reason or other, could not identify with the model farmer.
A more recent extension package has been the National Agricultural and Livestock Extension Programme(NALEP) (Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, 2000). The programme has bottom-up stakeholderparticipation in decision-making, planning and implementation of activities, as well as a structured supervision,reporting, monitoring and evaluation (Baiya, 2000). However, NALEP has been bogged down by too much datacollection with little follow-up activities.Another programme, the Farmer Field School (FFS), described as a ‘‘school without walls’’, is a participatorymethod for technology development and dissemination (Okoth et al., 2002; Duveskog, 2001). The school involves25–30 farmers in a given locality where the focus is field observations, hands-on activities and season-longresearch. However, FFS has only been applied in a few districts. The Agricultural Technology and InformationResponse Initiative (ATIRI) has been a participatory research programme implemented by the Kenya AgriculturalResearch Institute (KARI), meant to improve farmers’ ability to make demands on agricultural service providersand intermediary organizations (Kenya Agricultural Research Institute, 2001). In the ATIRI approach, proposalsare formulated by farmers’ groups and all activities are focused on the identification, adaptation and promotion ofnew technologies as well as preservation and dissemination of indigenous technologies. In general, many of theseextension packages have ended with as many problems as successes, with most of them having a strong focus onrain-fed agriculture. Smallholder irrigated agriculture has not had capacity building initiatives at national levelspecially targeted at them. In recent years, NGOs, private sector and research organizations have also beensupporting capacity development, and their role in smallholder irrigation has been especially pertinent.Recent water reforms have been implemented which seek to enhance community participation in irrigationdevelopment and management, as well as build capacity for both staff and farmers. The strategies to improveirrigation water management at farm level are also clearly spelt out, particularly how to involve communities inwater resource management, distribution and equitable sharing (Ministry of Water Resources Management andDevelopment, 2003). The current government strategy for capacity building in the agricultural sector (Republic ofKenya, 2004) highlights the need to reform extension services in the country. However, the proposed reforms targetthe Ministry of Agriculture, which no longer holds the portfolio for irrigation.
Article source: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ird.437
