Farmer Field Schools and the Future of Agricultural Extension in Africa

Published in the Journal of International Agricultural and Extension Education in 2002, this study provides an overview of the introduction of the Farmer Field School (FFS) approach to Africa. Case study materials highlight some of the successes achieved and difficulties encountered in the expanding use of the approach. According to the authors, the FFS approach, pioneered to become a successful model of agricultural development in South and Southeast Asia during the 1970s and 1980s, is a participatory agricultural extension strategy weaving together elements of adult education, agroecology, and local organisational development. FFS is an alternative extension service approach to the more traditional, top-down "Training & Visit" approach. In Africa, the FFS approach has been introduced to Ghana (1995), then Mali (1997), and over a dozen countries in the subsequent years. This study reviews FFS efforts in Ghana and Mali and discusses key challenges facing extension programmes in Africa.

Communication is an integral component of the FFS approach. Farmers who are trained in FFS are expected to become local change agents by initiating farmer-to-farmer transmission of information and farming techniques to accelerate the diffusion of new ideas. In addition, communication between FFS farmers is a site of experiments where new local farming technologies and knowledge can be potentially generated. The present study discusses in detail the role of communication in FFS.



Evaluation/Research Methodologies:

Each farmer field school implemented in Ghana and Mali is typically organised around a season-long series of weekly meetings focusing on biology, agronomic and management issues, where farmers conduct agroecosystem analysis, identify problems and then design, carry out, and interpret field experiments. In both Ghana and Mali, national governments established programmes designed to support FFS expansion.

The study used field data collected from two of Africa's oldest FFS implementation sites, Ghana and Mali FFSs. The researchers used qualitative data collection method employing focus groups and individual interviews with FFS participating and non-participating farmers, as well as interviews with FFS project team members.



Key Findings/Impact:

The field data from Ghana and Mali highlighted six key lessons of FFS.

First, those FFS efforts that were responsive to local concerns were much more successful. Ghana's FFS programmes attempted to avoid the "lack of relevancy" problem - a perennial stumbling block in African agricultural development - by conducting extensive formative analysis and consultations with local farmers to identify local farming needs and most promising technologies. The efforts resulted in the adoption of the introduced techniques and economic gains for farmers. In contrast, Mali's FFS effort was only marginally successful, due in large part to the lack of attention given to locally relevant pedagogic themes at FFS.

Second, FFS was effective in facilitating farmers' acquisition of systems-level knowledge (e.g., understanding in ecology), which in turn motivated many farmers to carry out experiments on their own after their attendance. FFS farmers cited the insect-plant interactions and the season-long plant life cycle as the most valuable learning areas. However, very few FFS farmers developed understandings of what was meant by experimentation or the basic approach used in conducting experiments. As a result, FFS farmers developed very little skill to independently generate knowledge through experimentation, or the ability to translate experimentations into useful knowledge.

Third, FFS helped a significant number of its graduates to engage in formal and informal communication with non-FFS farmers as well as with FFS farmers, extending the benefits of FFS beyond its institutional boundary. A number of FFS farmers started to give unsolicited advice to neighboring (nonparticipating) farmers, and many developed apprenticeship-type relations with other farmers to spread the skills, information, and knowledge acquired through FFS. Some FFS graduates independently organised small group meetings. However, the content of these exchanges was limited to specific technologies or management practice. More holistic issues, such as the ecological considerations in farming, were much less communicated between farmers.

Fourth, two very distinct trends were observed in FFS' effort to create local organisational structures supporting pest management practices among farmers. On the one hand, in villages where there were no existing local organisational structures (cooperatives, village associations, producer groups, etc.), FFS tended to serve as the catalyst to mobilise capital and identify income-generating projects (e.g., opening bank accounts, raising capital through the sale of produce from FFS test plots, collection of monthly membership fees, etc.). On the other hand, in areas with existing local organisational structures, FFS played a much more limited technical input role, and had marginal organisational impacts on local structures for pest management techniques.

Fifth, FFS in general failed to make contribution to the creation of "learning communities" that bring together farmers, extension agents, researchers, and others. The FFS training helped a significant number of farmers and extension agents to develop collaborative relationships, but some farmers and extension officers failed to move on from the legacy, more top-down relations characteristic of the "Train & Visit" model. There was very little evidence of the development of satisfactory researcher-extension and researcher-farmer relations. Similarly, efforts to strengthen the collaborative relations between national FFS programmes and NGOs were largely unsuccessful.

Finally, FFS efforts faced challenges in integrating the FFS model into existing extension programmes. The authors suggest that the difficulty in integrating FFS into extension programmes may derive from the lack of explicit plans in extension services for assessing programme implementation techniques, programme support, follow-up activities, and relationships with existing extension activities. The authors also note that more efficient integration of FFS into extension programmes may need better and more extensive training of extension agents.

The authors argue that in order to generate more positive outcomes in FFS programmes, fundamental changes will be needed in many of the bureaucratic and attitudinal foundations within most state-run extension programmes. They cite that the top-down relation between extension agents and farmers was ingrained in extension practices during a decade or more of "Train & Visit" programmes. The authors also strongly argue for the local institutionalisation of FFS programmes. They assert that a more concrete grounding of FFS in community-level social integration would lead to improvement in local relevancy of FFS programmes and, hence, to sustainable practices.