Specific objective: To strengthen the voice of farmers’ organizations in agricultural policy making formulation, planning, implementation, budgeting and monitoring and evaluation in seven target districts.
Project Location: Rwanda (Ruhango, Burera, Rulindo, Rubavu, Rutsiro, Kayonza and Gatsibo).
INTRODUCTION:
Imbaraga is an independent, non-governmental National Farmers Organization. Imbaraga works with farmers to improve the socio-economic conditions of an estimated 27,400 members located in 25 out of 30 districts throughout the country. Imbaraga is structured from the village to the national level and governed by the vision of making each of its members “A professional farmer and a change maker” through “lobby and advocacy”; “increase in productivity and competitiveness” and “environmental protection”.
International Alert is an independent, non-governmental peace building organization. It works with people who are directly affected by violent conflict to improve their prospects of peace. Alert seeks to influence the policies and ways of working of governments, international organizations like the UN and multinational companies, to reduce conflict risk and increase the prospects of peace.
Imbaraga and International Alert are co-implementing since January 2018 a three year project (2018-2020) entitled “Ijwi ry’Abahinzi n’Aborozi i.e. Farmers Voice Project (FVP)” in seven mentioned districts located in four provinces of Rwanda.
The key problem this project seeks to address is related to poverty and food insecurity that affect a great number of the Rwandan population especially in the project operation areas. Thus, there may be so many unresolved issues that are not part of the advocacy activities of civil society organizations mainly in the agricultural sector.
The issue of food insecurity has been taken into consideration by the government policies and strategies set up but these latter are top-down to engage the government bodies at national and district levels, the private sector and farmers. This process fails to accommodate learning expertise from bottom-up which can be capitalized on to support a more effective response (where farmers themselves better understand the logic behind strategies and therefore are more likely to implement them). Most importantly, the current top-down approach represents a missed opportunity to tackle food insecurity in an integrated-and therefore more sustainable- way.
More precisely, in 2016 Rwanda was ranked 159/188 in the human development index (HDI) , hence a need to come up with strategies through participatory engagement to reduce such levels of poverty. Therefore, adopting a multi-stakeholder consultative approach will allow all the strategies to benefit from and build on existing initiatives already ongoing in areas of high food insecurity and poverty levels in general. If farmers are more involved in this decision-making process, they are able to influence and change social attitudes and behaviours around crop growth and consumption so that dependency- and therefore vulnerability- levels are reduced.
The success of such a consultative approach is predicted on the ability of farmers themselves to clearly articulate and voice their concerns and recommendations in a constructive way. Civil society has a critical role to play in this process, bridging the gap between farmers and farming communities, national level policy makers and district level government offices and monitoring the quality and responsiveness of policy implementation to farmer and community needs.
“Ijwi ry’ABahinzi n’Aborozi” (Farmers Voice Project) aims to strengthen the participatory research and advocacy capacities of existing civil society bodies working on food security (including farmer cooperatives, value chain associations and research organizations) and creating mutually compatible District Farmers Network (DFN) that offer a space for farmers to voice their concerns and recommendations. Together, the CSOs and DFNs will monitor the extent to which implement food security policies are responsive to the social and economic concerns they have identified. In order to tackle these issues in a constructive and sustainable way, the action will also directly engage relevant district and national government offices, sharing research findings, lessons and monitoring information directly with them and creating platforms for joint collaboration to address issues raised through focused, regular, roundtables and face-to-face problem-solving meetings.
In order to achieve this mission, Imbaraga and International Alert will conduct an assessment to get a clear picture of the situation, establish a DFN organ at district level. This organ shall be a formal way of setting strategies to overcome issues related to agriculture policies implementation and thus propose possible means of networking and coordinating all efforts leading to fruitful advocacy works.
All what will be done by Imbaraga and Alert lead to the following three expected results of this project:
ER1: Agricultural oriented CSOs are better equipped to engage farmers and advocate for their rights in targeted regions.
The first expected result will mainly focus on how best CSOs can provide a bridge between farmers and policy circles. The CSOs targeted in this action will form a National Platform and will organize advocacy and awareness raising activities with other CSOs to maximize impact. The national platform will collect all issues and filter them by categories and relevance for later to be advocated for and share with concerned line ministries, government institutions and other direct stakeholders.
ER2: Capacities of the District Farmers’ Network in representing farmers’ interests, rights and needs are strengthened.
The second expected result seeks to emphasize on farmers’ representation. In order to effectively feed the national level CSO advocacy and research initiatives, farmers must be given the space to voice their concerns and interests, and coordinate with other farming related bodies- such as farmer cooperatives, value chain associations and businesses. Although there are farmer’s associations across Rwanda, the impact of their advocacy and influencing role is curtailed by the fact that they do not maximize their resources by collaborating on joint campaigns. For example, those with a wide reach often do not combine their skills with a high level of technical expertise, or those operating at community level fail to scale up messages to the national level by working with another organization with higher level connections. Working with a broader range of partners- including research and private sector partners- would facilitate a more integrated, multi-pronged approach and create space for greater innovation in tackling fundamental questions of poverty and malnutrition in Rwanda.
ER3: Improved collaboration and coordination among agricultural oriented CSOs at national level for improved level of influence over policies and decision making.
The third and last expected result of this project focuses on the collaboration and coordination at the top level. If CSOs fuse their scattered advocacy efforts by sharing their research findings, harmonize evidence based advocacy messages and are more collaborative in their engagement of policy makers focused on food security and agricultural issues then their advocacy messages will be more convincing and therefore more effective because they will open a greater space for discussion and dialogue around the root causes of the issues they are trying to tackle and will form a more unified voice that reaches a wider audience.
