Quezon City, Philippines — The Asian Farmers’ Association for Sustainable Rural Development (AFA) and Agriterra, an agri-agency supporting farmer organizations worldwide, held the “Farmers Advocacy Consultation Tool (FACT) Preparatory Workshop and Training of Trainers” last July 22-27, 2013 at the University Hotel in UP Diliman, Quezon City, Philippines
FACT is a methodology for an organization to prepare good proposals (policy positions and proposals, programs, strategic plans, projects, etc.) based on consultations with its membership and the advice of experts (academics, consultants, etc.), that allows it to have a good understanding of the relevant issues and to show that the proposals are based on real needs.
It rests on four pillars such as, consultations with membership (well-documented and registered membership consultations), participatory research (in order to systematize the results and combine with desk research to substantiate the proposals), writing SMART proposals (elaboration of technically well-prepared positions or proposals), and lobby mapping and stakeholders analysis (for a successful lobby/advocacy and negotiation of proposals).
The preparatory workshop on July 22-25 was attended by leaders and staff from farmer organizations (PAKISAMA, FFF, PDCI, PASAKA, AFA), NGOs (PhilDHRRA) and agri-agencies (Trias SEA, AsiaDHRRA).
The workshop helped define which FACT concepts can be useful to be inserted or adapted to the usual work of farmer organizations and is to be followed by a period of ‘learning by doing’ in which each organization will test these selected concepts in their work.
The training of trainers on July 26-27, on the other hand, was attended by selected participants from the preparatory workshop, as well as representatives from farmer organizations in Nepal (CTCF, NEFSCUN ) and Moldova (NFFM) who have already undergone the preparatory workshop.
Nellie van der Pasch of Agriterra and Mirjam Ssenyonga of Trias Uganda facilitated both the preparatory workshop and the training of trainers.
The preparatory workshop (as well as the training of trainers) is the first part in the “FACT trajectory,” which also consists of actual practice of the FACT approach and presentation and analysis of the results of implementation.
The FACT trajectory is being rolled out by Agriterra for farmer organizations in different countries Asia in cooperation with AFA.
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