Accountability Participation Representation Strategic potential Gender Professional capacity Organization X, 2002 and 2004 2004 2002 Assessing the capacities of farmers’ organisations (profiling) Approach, methodology, choices for further development This discussion paper has been prepared for IFAD-AGRICORD consultations (February/March 2012) by Jur Schuurman (Agriterra), and reflects the views of the AgriCord M&E team (Pekka Jamsen, Jur Schuurman, Anne Souharse, Ngolia Kimanzu, Marek Poznanski, Thomas Vervisch), February 2012. 1. Assessing and showing the capacities of farmers’ organisations In recent years, the Farmers Fighting Poverty programme has collected a wealth of information about a number of farmers’ organisations that the agri-agencies work with, generally presented as profilings. Farmers’ organisations have shown interest for profiling since the years 2003-2004 1 . One of the first initiatives was taken in 2002 by Asiadhrra and Agriterra, in order to make a description of organisations in Asia 2 . On this basis, and with involvement of other organisations, also from Africa and Latin America, a tool was developed by Agriterra. Its quantitative form was not unlike the Octagon of SCC, the Swedish Cooperative Center 3 , enabling the generation of radar diagrams or spider maps in order to make visible, at a glance, the (changes in) strength of rural membership organisations. The spider map approach is based upon the idea that a comprehensive picture of the organisation’s capacity and development profile can be obtained through systematic assessment of a number of key features of the organisation. But also, the approach allows for identification of measures and ways to improve the organisation’s capacity to perform effectively. If the same analysis is made systematically on several occasions over several years, it becomes possible to assess changes in the organisation. 2. Critical aspects of a well-functioning farmers’ organisation (leading indicators) Among farmers’ organisations and agri-agencies, there is a wide consensus on the basic qualities or capacities that are important for any farmers’ organisation (of any type, for a local women producers’ group to a national platform over a commodity-specific or input-specific coop). On the basis of discussions between farmers’ organisations and agri-agencies, and taking into account the Internal Organisation Model (IOM) but enriching this with the specific nature of membership organisations, the following eight qualities have been defined as being basic, and are called leading indicators: the critical aspects by which to assess the strength of a rural membership organisation. 1 Presentation by Ph. Kiriro at the World Farmers’ Congress of IFAP, Washington, 2004. 2 Profiles of people’s organisations in Rural Asia. Asiadhrra and Agriterra, 2002. 3 Sida and SCC started to develop the Octagon assessment tool in 1999, launching it in 2001. The focus was on NGOs, not on farmers’ organisations. The Octagon is based on a different group of indicators.
Transcript
Accountability
Participation
Representation
Strategic potential
Gender
Professional capacity
Organization X, 2002 and 2004
2004 2002
Assessing the capacities of farmers’ organisations (profiling) Approach, methodology, choices for further development This discussion paper has been prepared for IFAD-AGRICORD consultations (February/March 2012) by Jur Schuurman (Agriterra), and reflects the views of the AgriCord M&E team (Pekka Jamsen, Jur Schuurman, Anne Souharse, Ngolia Kimanzu, Marek Poznanski, Thomas Vervisch), February 2012.
1. Assessing and showing the capacities of farmers’ organisations
In recent years, the Farmers Fighting Poverty programme has collected a wealth of information about a number of farmers’ organisations that the agri-agencies work with, generally presented as profilings. Farmers’ organisations have shown interest for profiling since the years 2003-2004
1.
One of the first initiatives was taken in 2002 by Asiadhrra and Agriterra, in order to make a description of organisations in Asia
2. On this basis, and with involvement of other organisations, also from Africa and Latin
America, a tool was developed by Agriterra. Its quantitative form was not unlike the Octagon of SCC, the Swedish Cooperative Center
3, enabling the generation of radar diagrams or spider maps in order to make
visible, at a glance, the (changes in) strength of rural membership organisations. The spider map approach is based upon the idea that a comprehensive picture of the organisation’s capacity and development profile can be obtained through systematic assessment of a number of key features of the organisation. But also, the approach allows for identification of measures and ways to improve the organisation’s capacity to perform effectively. If the same analysis is made systematically on several occasions over several years, it becomes possible to assess changes in the organisation.
2. Critical aspects of a well-functioning farmers’ organisation (leading indicators)
Among farmers’ organisations and agri-agencies, there is a wide consensus on the basic qualities or capacities that are important for any farmers’ organisation (of any type, for a local women producers’ group to a national platform over a commodity-specific or input-specific coop). On the basis of discussions between farmers’ organisations and agri-agencies, and taking into account the Internal Organisation Model (IOM) but enriching this with the specific nature of membership organisations, the following eight qualities have been defined as being basic, and are called leading indicators: the critical aspects by which to assess the strength of a rural membership organisation.
1 Presentation by Ph. Kiriro at the World Farmers’ Congress of IFAP, Washington, 2004. 2 Profiles of people’s organisations in Rural Asia. Asiadhrra and Agriterra, 2002. 3 Sida and SCC started to develop the Octagon assessment tool in 1999, launching it in 2001. The focus was on NGOs, not on farmers’ organisations. The Octagon is based on a different group of indicators.
AgriCord On profiling
2
typical question leading indicator
Does it involve its members? 1 Participation
Does it report back to its members? 2 Accountability
Does it involve women? 3 Gender
Does it provide useful services? 4 Strategic potential
Does it relate to other actors? 5 Representation
Is it a professional organisation? 6 Professional capacity
Does it obtain income from other sources than donors? 7 Income diversification
Is it a representative organisation, with a significant proportion of the farmers in its membership?
8 Representativity
Detailed description of the definitions and contents of each indicator are available in the current manual4. The
indicators 1-6 are calculated by a mix of facts and opinions, and the indicators 7-8 are based solely on facts and figures. The first six indicators are commonly represented in the spider map (see above), the other two in more simple line graphs:
The leading indicators are composite or aggregate indicators, where the resulting value is a weighted combination of several variables. This makes understanding of the resulting values not an easy job.
Qualitative profiling At the same time, a format for a more qualitative description of organisations was developed and employed. In total, 30 such descriptive documents have been produced in the period 2007-2010 (see appendix, the right-hand column). At the end of this document, an overview is given of farmers’ organisations with both the available quantitative profiles (for more than 60 organisations) and the descriptive documents (for 30 organisations from among those more than 60). All this information (both the figures and the documents) can also be consulted on www.agro-info.net by any interested party, in the Organisations module of the site.
3. Usefulness and practical aspects
The strong points of the profiling are, from the organisations’ point of view, an increased visibility of the organisation (particularly when also a descriptive document is made) and the potential for analysis, jointly with the agri-agency. Also, from the organisations’ point of view, it provides valuable information to the leadership and management for internal guidance and policies. For the agri-agencies and for their backdonors, profiling is not only an instrument to help them and the organisations to define the way forward, but also an accountability tool: we say that we endeavour to strengthen farmers’ organisations, hence we had to specify that conception of strength and develop a method
4 Producer organisation profiling: manual to the quantitative analysis, v. 2.2. January 2010 (Agriterra)
to measure it from time to time. This made it possible to consistently report on the changes in the farmers’ organisations over a longer period (2007-2010). See chapter 1.2 in the Activity Report on the Farmers Fighting Poverty programme 2007-2010
5.
The profiling instrument is valued by both the organisations and the agri-agencies, but not unconditionally, in the sense that the resulting scores on indicators are a starting point for further work, not an end station. This however is sometimes hampered by the fact that the instrument is seen by some as technocratic and cumbersome in its use: between initial data collection and final results the elapsed time can be considerable. This has to do with processing capacity in the agri-agencies but also with the amount of data requested from different parties: it simply does not go so quick. And a descriptive document certainly takes even more time. Two roads are open to improve on this. These paths do not exclude each other but can be very complementary. One of them is to connect the eight profiling indicators to the 17 ‘deliverables’ developed by AgriCord, and on which information will be collected anyway; the other is to make the collection and processing of scores joint and interactive exercise (with on-site presence by an agri-agency officer). For the link between deliverables and profiling indicators, see the table below.
Deliverable Profiling Indicator
Deliverable 1: The farmer organization plans, implements and monitors policies and operations within a strategy agreed by its membership in a participatory manner
Participation Strategic potential
Deliverable 2: The farmer organization has adequate and sustainable resources (infrastructure, finance, human resources and others) and manages them appropriately
Professional capacity Income diversification
Deliverable 3: The FO operates appropriate financial management systems to provide correct, timely and transparent financial information that guarantees accountability towards its members and donors. The farmer organisation management utilizes the financial reports for planning, control and decision-making
Accountability
Deliverable 4: The farmer organization is democratically governed and functions with the full participation of its informed members
Participation Accountability
Deliverable 5: The farmer organization has an active and representative membership, mandated by and structurally aligned with well functioning local basic groups with increased membership base
Participation Representativity
Deliverable 6: The farmer organization empowers youth, women and vulnerable groups to participate and to exploit their economic and social potential
Gender
Deliverable 7: The farmers' organisation has positioned itself strategically in the external environment in its own country and abroad, and is networking with other organisations. It has built visibility for increased credibility and influence.
Networking (Representation)
Deliverable 8: The FO has established formal institutional arrangements with relevant private, public and donor institutions with the aim of improving service-delivery to its members
Networking (Representation)
Deliverable 9: The farmer organization has analysed and decided on its strategic positions regarding policy issues in a participatory way
Participation
Deliverable 10: The farmer organization has developed an exchange process and joint positions with national, regional and international organizations of family farmers and other actors on issues related to agriculture and food security
Networking (Representation)
Deliverable 11: The farmers' organisation communicates on its policy positions Networking (Representation)
Deliverable 12: The farmer organization’s policy positions have been integrated in national strategy documents
Networking (Representation)
Deliverable 13: The farmer organization facilitates fair access to resources (such as land, rural credit and risk management products) for individual members, local farmer groups, sub-national or national level farmer organisations
Strategic potential
Deliverable 14: The farmer organization facilitates or provides sustainable and timely access to adequate, cost-efficient inputs and new techniques for agricultural production and for other rural income-generating activities. This includes knowledge dissemination (extension) and strengthening the management capacities of members and local farmer groups
Strategic potential
Deliverable 15: The farmer organization facilitates or provides integrated services for individual farmers or local farmer groups to achieve a sustainable increase in processing, decreased post-harvest losses and improved product quality
Strategic potential
Deliverable 16: The farmer organization leads collective action to improve product marketing (better conditions including price, timely marketing, more value added and shorter chain) to increase the market power of family farmers and to achieve higher incomes
Strategic potential
Deliverable 17: The farmer organization has promoted transparent farmer-led rural enterprises with good potential for sustainability (agricultural inputs, marketing, processing and trading
Strategic potential
Cross-cutting concern 2: The farmer organization applies appropriate practices to foster the social, economical and political empowerment of women in its policies and operations
As regards the proposal for interactive data collection and processing, see choice (2) in the paragraph below. The session can consist of both (self-)assessments and the entering of indisputable facts and figures, to be processed by web-based software and yielding immediate results (scores on indicators and deliverables).
4. Choices for further development
A number of options are open. In as much as they are technical, we will not dwell on them here. Rather, the road ahead will be defined by the answers to some key questions on where we want to go with the profiling tool – and why.
1. What do we want with it: measurement or reflection? Is the profiling (or should it be) mainly a reporting/accountabiliy tool (i.e., describing and accounting for the degree to which an organisation changes), or an instrument for learning and an input for cooperation, as a result of joint reflection and discussion by the agency and the organisation? We think both, see (2). An interesting further development could take inspiration from the “balanced scorecard approach”
6.
2. How is it to be done? Until now, using the available information and exchanges with the profiled organisation, the profilings were made at a desk in an agri-agency. It is probably better to do it interactively and on the spot (with support from an agri-agencies’ officer), so that the concerned organisation sees the results immediately. Software is in principle available.
3. External or/and self-assessment Is the profiling an external (agri-agencies) tool (as it had been until now, among others in the sense that is the agri-agency that is responsible for text and figures) or one that can also be used by farmers’ organisations for self-assessments? If yes, can this be made clear by just stating clearly the name of the organisation responsible for publication? For the time being, we think it is better if it is only used by agri-agencies.
4. Quantitative or qualitative? Having heard many opinions, the option is to go for figures (hard facts and quantified data and opinions) leading to a diagram or ‘spider map’, or also qualitative descriptions and texts. In other words, we stick to facts as much as possible, but interactively generated/found (see (2), above).
5. Specific or general? The profiling is in principle always based upon the same leading indicators for different types of farmers’ organisations (advocacy-type or business-type, e.g. a cooperative society). Obviously, the relative importance of indicators, as well as the parameters used to measure them, will be different depending on the type of organisation.
6. Which organisations do we profile? What criterion do we want to determine which organisations to (periodically) profile/assess? In other words, of which organisations do we wish to report on their strengthening process? Ideally, once an agri-agency works with an organisation, it should want to be held accountable for its progress; i.e. you profile ALL clients. But if there is a time/resource constraint, a choice can be made, for instance on the basis of how much funds are channeled toward an organisation (i.e., leaving out the ones where agri-agency funding is minimal).
J. Schuurman, M&E task team AgriCord February 2012
