Farmers’ Knowledge

This project aims to increase the food security for 790 000 persons including 400 000 women in the rural areas of Senegal Haiti and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The project’s objective is to strengthen small farming business organizations’ capacities as well as the capacity of their members to ensure sustainable agricultural development. Strengthening small farming business organizations improves farmers’ access to production and marketing services necessary to improve nutrition and livelihoods. Small farmers become the driving force behind the sustainable development of targeted rural communities by contributing to the country's food reserves diversifying nutrition and increasing rural households’ income. Project activities include: (1) providing entrepreneurs with training and mentoring for implementing agricultural business improvement projects (i.e. family business-oriented plant production or cattle farming); (2) providing targeted communities with training leadership and mentoring for implementing environmental projects; (3) providing farmer groups with training and mentoring (i.e. collective farming product marketing systems); (4) providing regional and national organizations as well as regional and national small farming business organizations’ leaders with training and mentoring for implementing a collective project to improve financial and administrative systems; (5) implementing activities for training the trainers based on creating training and outreach tools (i.e. training modules on climate resilience gender equality governance); (6) implementing an interactive platform that facilitates long-distance exchanges between trainers and technical support with Canadian experts between missions; and (7) organizing missions visits and North-South South-North and South-South experience and expertise sharing putting farmers in contact with each other to help them find solutions to common problems. The Union des producteurs agricoles – Développeme

The expected outcomes for this project include: (1) 200 000 women men and youth in three countries benefit from small farming entrepreneurs’ sustainable food production increase and diversity and increase farm profitability; and (2) agricultural innovations systems are strengthened sustainable and equally accessible to all regardless of gender and age.