IFAD Calls for Farmers’ Organisations to Have a Bigger Role in Rural Development Planning
Farmers’ organisations should have a stronger role in shaping rural development programmes, with the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) calling for closer and more structured collaboration between governments, development partners and farmer representatives.
The call was made during the Regional Farmers’ Forum for Eastern and Southern Africa being held in Nairobi from September 29 to October 2, where farmers’ organisations and development stakeholders are discussing how to strengthen collaboration around rural transformation. The forum is designed as a platform for dialogue between farmers’ organisations, IFAD and other stakeholders on agriculture, rural development and poverty reduction.
IFAD Associate Vice-President for Country Operations Donal Brown said governments have an important role in bringing development partners and farmers’ organisations together because most IFAD resources are channelled through government systems.
He said stronger government involvement could help create more effective mechanisms for farmers’ organisations to participate in the design and implementation of rural development programmes.
Brown also argued that farmers’ organisations should be viewed as important institutions within rural communities rather than as competing interests. Their involvement, he said, can help development programmes better reflect the priorities and experiences of the farmers they are intended to support.
Farmers’ organisations seek greater role in programme design
The Eastern Africa Farmers Federation (EAFF) is pushing for national farmers’ organisations to be formally incorporated into Country Strategic Opportunities Programmes, commonly known as COSOPs.
COSOPs provide the framework for IFAD’s country-level engagement and investment priorities. Kenya’s 2020–2025 COSOP, for example, focused on improving climate-resilient natural resource management, access to productivity-enhancing assets and services, and access to post-production technologies and markets.
EAFF President Elizabeth Nsimadala said farmers’ organisations can be left out of national programme processes despite representing the smallholder farmers who are often the intended beneficiaries of rural development investments.
She called for farmers’ organisations to be involved earlier, including when priorities are identified and programmes are designed, rather than being brought in primarily during implementation.
EAFF’s current regional membership comprises 24 member organisations representing an estimated 25 million smallholder farmers across 10 Eastern African countries, according to the federation.
Nsimadala said this grassroots reach gives farmers’ organisations a potential role in communicating local priorities, supporting programme implementation and providing feedback on whether interventions are responding to farmers’ needs.
The federation’s areas of focus include market access, aggregation, structured markets, policy engagement, institutional capacity, youth and women’s participation and climate resilience.
Longer-term programmes and better coordination urged
The discussions also highlighted concerns about fragmentation in rural development financing.
Brown called for greater coordination among development partners as concessional financing for rural development becomes more constrained. Instead of multiple small projects operating independently, he argued for greater agreement around shared priorities and longer-term interventions.
The argument reflects a broader challenge in agricultural development: changes in rural economies, value chains and farming systems often require sustained investment and institutional development rather than short project cycles.
For farmers, the practical significance is that fragmented interventions can make it difficult to build lasting systems for market access, finance, infrastructure, extension, aggregation and climate resilience.
Longer-term planning can potentially allow successful approaches to be strengthened and expanded rather than being discontinued when individual projects end.
Market access and resilience remain key priorities
Pieternel Boogaard, IFAD Managing Director of the Office of Technical Delivery, said consultations with farmers and rural communities had identified market access, employment and resilience as broad priorities for the Fund’s strategy and replenishment discussions.
Resilience, she noted, extends beyond climate-related shocks. Rural economies can also be disrupted by events such as El Niño and constraints affecting the availability of agricultural inputs, including fertiliser.
These concerns are particularly relevant to smallholder farmers because disruptions in input supply, weather conditions and markets can affect production decisions and household incomes simultaneously.
IFAD’s work in Kenya has similarly emphasised market-oriented approaches and climate-resilient agricultural development, with its country programme covering areas including horticulture, dairy, cereals, rural finance and natural resource management.
Farmers seek a role in monitoring development programmes
EAFF is also calling for farmers’ organisations to participate in monitoring the performance of programmes supported through IFAD and other development partners.
Under this approach, farmers would not simply participate after programmes have been designed. Their organisations would also help identify priorities, assess implementation and provide feedback on areas requiring adjustment.
Such a system could provide development agencies with more direct information about how programmes are functioning at community level.
For farmers’ organisations, it would also create a formal channel through which lessons from local implementation can feed back into national and regional policy discussions.
The proposal builds on a longer-standing position among farmer organisations that they should be treated as development partners rather than only as beneficiaries. IFAD’s previous Farmers’ Forum processes have also emphasised stronger participation by farmers’ organisations in COSOP development and in monitoring IFAD-supported projects.
IFAD and EAFF work towards a formal partnership
EAFF and IFAD are working towards a more formal partnership that would include an action plan, defined deliverables and regular consultations.
Progress under the proposed partnership is expected to be reviewed at the Global Farmers Forum in Rome in 2028.
The current Nairobi forum therefore provides an opportunity to move the discussion from general calls for farmer participation towards more defined mechanisms for representation, consultation and accountability.
The outcome could be particularly relevant to smallholder farmers if farmer organisations are given clearly defined responsibilities and channels for influencing programme priorities rather than being included only as implementing partners.
Why the discussions matter to Kenyan agriculture
Kenya’s agricultural sector depends heavily on smallholder producers, while rural households continue to face challenges related to climate variability, access to finance, market linkages, input costs and productive technologies.
Giving farmer organisations a stronger role in development planning does not remove the responsibility of governments or development agencies. Instead, it can create another mechanism for bringing producers’ experiences into decisions about how agricultural investments are designed and delivered.
The effectiveness of such an approach will ultimately depend on how participation is structured, whether farmer organisations have meaningful influence over decisions, and whether agreed recommendations are translated into programmes with measurable responsibilities and resources.
The Regional Farmers’ Forum for Eastern and Southern Africa is being held alongside the ESA Business Planning Meeting in Nairobi from September 29 to October 2. The discussions bring together farmers’ organisations, IFAD and other development stakeholders to examine how rural development priorities can be identified, financed and implemented more effectively across the region.
For Kenya and neighbouring countries, the central issue is not simply whether farmers are consulted, but whether the institutions representing them have a meaningful place in the planning, implementation and monitoring of the investments intended to transform rural economies.
