Highlights: 

June 10, 2023. This June 14,15 and 16 The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)  hasorganizedaGlobal Forum on the future of farmer field schools for sustainable agrifood systems in Malawi. The forum will gather 120 participants from around the world representingfarmers, governments, international organizations, private sector, producer organizations and civil society, all working towards more sustainable agrifood systems through farmer field schools. The event willbrainstorm on the future of Farmer Field Schools (FFS), after more than 30 years since the conception of the approach. Discussions will focus on innovations, strategy for the future, priority areas and implementation mechanisms. 

Created by FAO with its partners and farmers in Asia in 1989, farmer field schools have been empowering farmers to drive sustainable development at the local level for over 3 decades. Originally conceived on integrated pest management in rice production, FFSs have since found success in a wide variety of contexts around the world. Since 1989, an estimated 20 million smallholder farmers have been trained using the FFS approach, which has been implemented in over 90 countries. 

In recent years, Malawi has been the birthplace of serveralkey innovations, including a country-wide digital real-time monitoring, evaluation and learning system for FFS. Due to exciting experiences happening with FFS in Malawi, it was chosen as the meeting point for the Global FFS Forum 

At the core of farmer field schools is hands-on group learning. Building on farmers’ skills and knowledge, FFS participants test new ideas and enhance their capacity to critically analyse and solve local agricultural challenges. Today, many development partners, major international and local NGOs, national farmer organizations, community-based organizations and others rely on FFS as an entry point for the community and rural development. Multiple organizations at global, regional, national and local levels have integrated FFS as a delivery mechanism for their interventions.   

In 2018, FAO established the Global FFS Platform. The Platform is based in the Plant Production and Protection division (NSP) of the FAO, bringing together over 20 partner organizations and 1 900 practitioners from 138 countries to support exchange of experiences across countries and partners, and develop tools collaboratively to support innovation in the use of FFS in the field. 

Significant challenges affecting agricultural and food systems today, and the growth in the use of FFS by hundreds of diverse organizations call for a review of the scale and quality of FFS globally. 

Sweeping global trends, including climate change and biodiversity loss, changing demographics, ICTs, and opportunities with sustainable value chains and technologies, all create a rapidly changing context for smallholder farmers. This comes with increasing recognition that farmers, their practices and their capacity to transform rural areas are at the center of creating sustainable agrifood systems.  

In order to expand the potential of FFS to support transitions to sustainable agrifood systems, the forum will focus ondefining critical actions to scale FFS capacitieswhile maintaining quality; strengthennetworks and coordination; to better harness innovative tools and approaches; tobuild multistakeholder engagement for resource mobilization and finance to meet increased demand for FFS.Mainconclusions and findings of the forum will be shared through the Global FFS Platform discussion group.Join now the Global FFS Community of Practice to stay tuned!

Register to the livestream of the Global FFS Forum through zoom: https://bit.ly/3JcKahV