Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
communities. African team members include Debub University and SoS Sahel from
Ethiopia; Makerere University and Environmental Alert from Uganda; and ETC-
East Africa and Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) from Kenya.
European partners include Wageningen University and Research Centre in The
Netherlands and the National Agricultural Research Foundation from Greece.
B) Project objectives
The project has the following objectives:
•
To develop an institutional sustainable approach of identifying, testing, monitoring
and evaluation of farm or catchment-level technologies addressing soil nutrient
management constraints using principles and institutional aspects of the Farmer
Field School (FFS) approach;
•
To generate appropriate and effective technologies to address problems of soil
nutrient depletion aimed at a long-term increase of productivity and profitability
of farming systems in East Africa; and
•
To develop a participative policy formulation process involving researchers, exten-
sionists and district policymakers aiming at formulating appropriate district policy
recommendations and policy instruments to address soil nutrient depletion leading
to a sustainable increase in productivity of farming systems in East Africa.
C) Project activities
A literature review on FFS experiences was conducted, followed by a field visit to
the major FFS programmes in Kenya. This revealed the following major issues to be
addressed in the methodology:
•
Learning activities have a cycle of 1 cropping season, which is insufficient to
appraise full range of impacts of nutrient management technologies;
•
Relatively little attention is paid to developing farmers learning and research
capacity in soil fertility issues, apart from central-plot experimentation, on-farm
experimentation is required to capture diversity and individual adaptation of
technologies;
•
Issuing of initial grants jeopardizes the sustainability and up-scaling of the FFS
approach;
•
Systematic in-built monitoring and impact assessments are inadequate;
•
Policy and institutional support at national level is necessary for a successful up-
scaling of the approach.
In order to address these observed shortcomings, the project decided to initiate a
pilot FFS programme with a focus on long-term group sustainability and developing
learning and research capacities. It is aimed to contribute to the on-going search for
the most appropriate and effective model of farmers' platforms.
Kiambu and Mbeere District were selected to implement the activities. Both
districts face serious soil fertility decline, have experiences with the FFS approach, and
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