TRAINING FOR RURAL DEVELOPMENT HARNESSING THE POWER OF COMMUNITY GROUPS

Kathleen Collett (1)

1 CSD - City & Guilds Centre for Skills Development

Farmer groups can play an important role in delivering effective agricultural training. They provide a structure that enables smallholders to learn from one another, and which allows technologies to be more readily adapted and successful adaptations shared. There is research that supports the value of groups in helping small producers gain technical knowledge (Spielman et al, 2008), build small enterprises (Kodithuwakku & Rosa, 2002), and develop management capabilities (Rouse, 2006). This is especially important for women smallholders, who frequently lack access to relevant information about new products and processes, and whose productivity is often constrained by a lack of relevant skills (Danida, 2004). Optimism around the potential of women's groups to enhance the delivery agricultural extension programmes and empower women smallholders glosses over the complexities of social capital in farmer groups, however, and ignores certain potentially negative effects of social capital on women: Social relationships in groups may be strained by using the group to deliver training, groups may exclude poorer members of the community, and powerful norms and networks operating at every level from the home to the broader society may limit the ability of women to benefit from groups, and of groups to create empowering change (Mayoux, 2001; Johnson, 2005). If group-based extension programmes are to work, they must develop practical ways of taking these issues into account. This paper looks at how training can support the effectiveness of women's groups in agriculture, drawing on four case study projects, two in India and two in Ghana..

Mots clés: women; smallholders; self-help groups; agriculture; training

Domaines: Agriculture, économie et politique

Kathleen Collett. TRAINING FOR RURAL DEVELOPMENT HARNESSING THE POWER OF COMMUNITY GROUPS. ISDA 2010, Jun 2010, Montpellier, France. 13 p. ⟨hal-00522953⟩