Building Strong Grassroots Organizations

[Paul Ondeng]

Our experience with small scale farmers is that where there are strong grassroots institutions (self help groups, welfare organizations, cooperatives), the position to access inputs at best prices as well as access the lucrative domestic and export markets is enhanced. The challenge is that building capacity especially when the objective is to promote entrepreneurial farming requires considerable resources because it will almost always be a long drawn process of incubation rather than a one or two day workshop.

 

To support this need, we are inviting organizations whose groups face this challenge to write to us and share the specific needs and regions of engagement so that we can explore ways of clustering groups and distributing costs between organizations.

 

Our organization is presently preparing to roll out a project that will see the establishment of more than 3,000 digital villages in agricultural areas across the country. These will be service hubs that will work with already mobilized farmers groups to link them with markets. The project targets more than 2 million farmers in Kenya and is expected to be extended to Uganda and Tanzania by 2013.

 

The digital villages will be Mpesa agents, bank agents, cyber cafes, stationary shops and other carefully selected small business in the interior of farming areas. This project is in collaboration with the leading mobile service provider in Kenya and a leading commercial bank.

 

The objective is to exploit emerging technologies to link farmers with markets but to do in away that links financial services and the logistics of delivery to markets.