nihal7 s

The smallholder farming landscape is rapidly changing owing to current trends that create both challenges and opportunities for rural communities in their efforts to commercialise.In this fast-changing environment, farmers and their rural advisory service (RAS) providers must learn new  skills and find new ways of working together to develop inclusive business models that help link diverse farmers and entrepreneurs to growth markets. One solution to help with rural commercialisation is to support the growing numbers of agripreneurs, who could play a catalytic role in generating new income streams and jobs.

A Eitzinger CIAT s

Businesses and other institutions around the world are increasingly using the term ‘professionalism’ to describe their level of service provision. While some professions, such as medicine and engineering, have been well known and recognised through standard qualifications for many years, others – such as rural advisory services (RAS) – have only recently begun to aspire to a higher level of professionalism.

Helah Robinson 2

The rapidly changing economic, climatic, and social environment for agriculture worldwide is causing farms to become increasingly diverse in terms of size, resources, production patterns, access to markets, and household characteristics.1 So there is a strong need for more diverse and specialised agricultural advisory services (AAS) that are relevant to farmers. This requires rethinking ways of organising and financing AAS towards systems that are led and tailored by demand from farmers.

marine rouchousse s

In West Africa, during the 1990s, new innovative advisory methods were used that broke with the tradition of top- down public extension focusing on production, and instead helped meet the diversity of producers’ needs by using participatory methods. Management Advice for Family Farms (MAFF) is one of these approaches. MAFF has been adapted for diverse contexts and is today implemented by a wide range of actors, including non-government organisations (NGOs), producer organisations, cotton companies, and government agencies, in several African countries, reaching approximately 100,000 producers. MAFF has recently been further adapted to other contexts, including Myanmar (South East Asia), and Malawi (East Africa).