FAO.org

A people-centred IPM movement has grown in Asia since the 1980s, and is now spreading to parts of Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. During this period, many variants have evolved, and continue to evolve, within the specific natural and operational environments of different countries, cultures, and communities. From [...]

The paper discusses the conceptual underpinnings of community-based extension approaches, highlights theoretical and practical challenges inherent in their design, and assesses the evidence available so far on their performance. The paper reviews both quantitative and qualitative studies, focusing on three examples that contain important elements of community-based extension: the [...]

A project in Ghana tried to encourage government extension agents to change their attitudes. Instead of merely teaching new techniques, they were supposed to engage rice farmers in a two-way learning experience. The extension agents accepted some of the project philosophy, but they still thought that the goal of the [...]

The study found that younger farmers who belong to other groups, such as savings and credit groups, tended to participate in field schools. Females made up 50 percent of FFS membership. Reasons for not joining an FFS included lack of time and information. FFSs were shown to be especially beneficial [...]

In view of the market failures and the state failures inherent in providing agricultural extension, community-based approaches, which involve farmers‘ groups, have gained increasing importance in recent years as a ―third way‖ to provide this service. The paper discusses the conceptual underpinnings of community-based extension approaches, highlights theoretical and practical [...]

Les dix champs-écoles pilotes installés au Kasaï occidental en 2003 ont permis aux paysans membres d’expérimenter de nouveaux modes de gestion des cultures, et, leurs résultats ont été jugés satisfaisants. L’originalité et la simplicité des procédés utilisés favorisent, non seulement une meilleure appropriation des innovations, mais aussi une participation active [...]

The purpose of this book is to provide information on how to transform and strengthen pluralistic agricultural extension and advisory systems in moving toward the broader goal of increasing farm income and improving rural livelihoods. The focus of this book is primarily on the technical knowledge, management skills, and information services that small-scale farm [...]

The Integrated Pest Management Collaborative Research Support Program (IPM CRSP) has been implementing IPM farmer field schools (FFS) with small scale farmers in Eastern Uganda since 2001. This study assesses the impact of cowpea-specific IPM FFS on IPM knowledge and the theoretical link between increased knowledge on the adoption of [...]

This paper examined the various approaches to agricultural extension and the challenges of farmer-led extension approaches. These challenges include changes in the organization structure and profession attitude, strengthen farmers' organizations, farmers' acceptability, fiscal sustainability and logistics issues.

Recently the Government of KP has introduced a new extension approach i.e Farmers’ Field Schools (FFS) to build the capacity of farmers through discovery based learning. The present paper is based on the study designed to analyze the participation of farmers in the FFS as an alternative extension strategy to [...]