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This paper is based on participatory development research carried out in Soroti district of Uganda with the aim to assess the impact of agricultural development among poor farmers. The central argument in this study is that a combination of farmer empowerment and innovation through experiential learning in FFS groups and [...]

The issue of empowerment is of increasing relevance to CARE. During the last few years, the organization has been giving greater emphasis to right-based approaches that ‘empower people to claim and exercise their rights and fulfill their responsibilities’. More recently, CARE-Bangladesh has started to plan a new programme for the [...]

Farmer field school programs incorporating farmer participatory research (FPR-FFS) have the potential to provide important benefits to their participants and to other farmers who benefit from improved cultivars and management techniques. An FPR-FFS program in San Miguel, Cajamarca, Peru, has been in place since 1999 with an emphasis on management [...]

Farmer Field Schools (FFS) are an intensive training approach introduced in the last decade in many developing countries to promote knowledge and uptake of ecologically sensible production approaches, and in particular, integrated pest management which minimises pesticide use. Because of the high training cost, the viability of the program depends [...]

Economic evaluation of the Farmer Field Schools (FFSs) in the Cajamarca Department (Peru) was undertaken to help determine whether agricultural extension via FFSs can contribute to poverty alleviation. Farmer Field Schools involving a number of important crops have already been evaluated at other sites around the world. These studies reported [...]

The broad objective of the local chicken FFS is to improve income and household food security in the smallholders farming system.

More than half of the world’s cotton is produced by Asian farmers, the majority of them small landholders with plot sizes of less than one-half hectare. Within Asia, cotton production is diverse and this diversity manifests itself among the countries participating in the FAO-EU Integrated Pest Management (IPM) Programme for [...]

A report for CARE Bangladesh. Focusing on empowerment and possible policies and plans, it includes conceptual models, evaluation indicators, and suggestions relating to strategy. Particular attention has been given to the Farmer Field School approach as an entry point for empowerment.

Using survey-data from Peru, this paper evaluates the impact of a pilot farmerfield-school (FFS) program on farmers’ knowledge of integrated pest management (IPM) practices related to potato cultivation. We use both regression analysis controlling for participation and a propensity score matching approach to create a comparison group similar to the FFS [...]

In East Africa, FFS are being used to address several sustainable livelihood aspects with integrated production and pest management (IPPM) as the entry point. The effectiveness of the FFS as a vehicle for achieving the goals hinges on their fiscal sustainability by the communities and local governments. In this regards, [...]