Creating a sustainable yet profitable agricultural sector in Kenya has been one of the major challenges facing the sector for many decades now. Successive governments have invested heavily in training other sectors – technical and vocational fields, medicine and education – leaving agriculture, the backbone of Kenya’s economy, to find its way in the mazy task of building the economy. More advanced economies with much less fertile lands that Kenya has managed to feed their vast economies, and exporting surplus, by investing in specialised training and education for their farmers.
To illustrate how agriculture suffers deficit of training, once a core subject in the country’s secondary education syllabus, Agriculture – the mainstay of the majority of Kenyans – is no longer taught in schools. Enrolment in the few agricultural training institutes has been dwindling, and so has productivity in farms. Faced with few training opportunities, lack of exposure and reliance on untested yet common traditional farming methods, most farmers practice their trade in a trial-and-error manner, resulting in unsustainable, poor quality yields.
The establishment of Farmer Field Schools
The Kenya tea sector – one of the largest suppliers of tea globally – has been painstakingly built on the efforts of smallholder tea farmers under the guidance of the country’s largest private tea producing and marketing Agency – Kenya Tea Development Agency (KTDA).
In the early 2000s, right after privatisation and faced with dwindling green leaf volumes, KTDA realised that its smallholder tea farmers, despite their passion for growing the crop and application of fertilizer to their crop, farmers lacked the requisite scientific knowledge on how to improve yields in terms of quality and quantity.
Further, the tea sector was facing challenges such as climate change and reduced landholdings, which informed the need to improve yields on smaller pieces of land, while retaining the quality that KTDA-produced tea had to become world renowned for. These challenges conspired to birth the idea of KTDA’s Farmer Field Schools, which is a targeted investment in farmer education.
With support from partners such as Sustainable Trade Initiative (IDH), Unilever, Rainforest Alliance and Ethical Tea Partnership (ETP), the idea behind FFS is anchored in the belief that our farmers require the best personalised education service, delivered in easy to understand, yet effective manner. The pedagogy that anchors FFS is unique in its bottom-up, needs-based approach, which trains large numbers of farmers at relatively low-cost, who then train others, and the knowledge chain is sustained.
Here’s how it works
At the start of the year farmers are consulted about the key issues affecting both their tea crop and their farm so that the training can be designed around their needs. Groups of at least 30 farmers are trained over 12 months, based on a prepared curriculum whose development has been researched on and approved by qualified tea specialists.
At the end of the training, the farmers share their experiences with their neighbours, so that education on improved tea practices is spread across the locality. Within a relatively short time, the whole locality receives training on a wide range of topics, which illustrates the effectiveness of the FFS schools-without-walls approach. This trainer-of-trainers model ensures education is seamlessly passed from group to group and eventually to the whole tea farming community.
The FFS curriculum includes modules on integrated soil management, harvest- and post-harvest management, eco-system conservation, composting techniques, replanting and rejuvenation and agronomic management.
Additional topics cover diversification of income, HIV and AIDS, kitchen gardens to improve nutrition and food security. Farmers are encouraged to grow other crops that will supplement their incomes in times when tea does not perform too well, as happens from time-to-time. All this training is facilitated by KTDA and its partners, at no cost to farmers.
The training is tailored around the farmers’ schedules so as not to disrupt their normal farm activities. KTDA-trained Tea Extension Service Assistants (TESAs) facilitate this training in the farms and the results are hard to ignore.
Impact
Both internal and independent studies have reported that farmers who have been through the programme boast improved production and yield, greater diversification of income, better living standards and improved health and safety standards. On average, the studies found that average yields increased by 30% for farmers who had undergone FFS training.
In some areas, participants have gone on to form self-help groups that leverage on lessons on the sustainable and diversified agriculture that they had learnt during FFS sessions.
It explains why FFS has been so successful – the fact that through education, KTDA tea farmers have been empowered to take charge of their destiny and earn more income.
What started as a pilot programme in 2008 targeting four factories has quickly scaled to cover all the 66 KTDA-managed factories. To date, more than 48,000 farmers have benefited from the learning programme carried by about 5000 FFSs. The commitment that KTDA farmers have shown towards FFS has catalysed its growth and popularity.
Now, the FFS model is being replicated in other tea growing countries in Asia and Africa. Without this investment in education, KTDA farmers would still be relying on outdated crop husbandry methods that are hindrances to realisation of the full potential of smallholder farmers.
FFS has demonstrated that by investing in educating smallholder farmers, not only are we empowering them to produce more, and in turn earn more, but also enable them practice more sustainable agriculture while improving the quality of their lives.
What next?
KTDA is scaling up FFS to train more farmers across the tea growing regions with the clear objective of ensuring all our farmers are empowered to produce good leaf under sustainable conditions. With more than 500,000 farmers affiliated to KTDA, the potential to grow FFS into an educational asset remains large.
KTDA is committed to ensuring all our farmers are empowered to sustainably produce more, earn more and live more holistically.