Farmer Field Schools as an Extension Strategy: A West African Experience

Introduction The continuing saga of efforts to stimulate economic growth in Africa through agricultural development reflects the rise and fall of the many 'fads and fashions' in international development over the past 50 years. Following the poor performance of rural development projects to significantly improve the welfare of the rural poor through the mid-1980s, the region has witnessed an almost universal abandonment of support for large-scale, state-run extension programs. After pursuing alternative policies, such as support of non-governmental organizations and, to a lesser extent, producer associations, a growing number of donors and governments have shown an interest in a renewed backing of state-sponsored agricultural extension programs. Recently, interest has begun to coalesce around the potentials offered by the Farmer Field School (FFS) approach. Included in this paper is a brief look at some of the key elements in the FFS approach and some notes on the source of information used in this paper. The results and conclusions center around 6 key issues: the responsiveness of the FFS approach to local conditions; FFS achievements in instilling systems learning and generation of new knowledge; facilitation of farmer-to-farmer information exchange; local institutionalization; impact on relationships between farmers, extension, and other stakeholders; and the specific challenges faced by extension programs in integrating the approach into their programs. Some concluding observations are made on the progress, pitfalls, and potentials of the FFS approach to fill a significant role in the revitalization of national extension programs within the region. Despite the potentials of a new era of support for national extension programs, a number of serious issues within the domain of extension practice remain to be addressed. While often masked under the new titles and phrases of the current development discourse, the challenges faced today reflect many of the perennial problems that have plagued development efforts over the past 50 years. These include, but are by no means limited to, the challenges of: becoming truly responsive to local conditions and concerns; facilitating constructive inter-organizational collaboration; fostering greater local self-reliance through individual capacity-building and local institutional development; addressing financial insecurity and low educational levels of extension staff; and the specific interests of engaging indigenous knowledge, farmer inventiveness and farmer-to-farmer communication. In the case of West African agricultural extension, attention has increasingly turned towards a loosely defined collection of 'participatory' approaches, none of which have asserted themselves in any form of operational dominance. Recently, however, interest has begun …