Small-holder Farmers Go Through Capacity Development Training

Tamale, July 18, GNA - Some 49 small-holder farmer groups in the Northern, Upper West and Upper East Regions have undergone a seven-day training on the Capacity Development of Farmer Based Organisations (FBOs) and Farmer-Based Cooperatives Organisations (FBCs) project.

The training was aimed at enhancing the dynamism of the various groups to improve their marketing and business capabilities to ensure that, their farming activities and business strived to improve their livelihood.

The project is being funded by the government of the Republic of Korea through its Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) with a grant aid of US$ 6,180,000 to be disbursed over a 42 month period.

The Association of Church-based Development Programme (ACDEP), a Tamale based NGO is the local implementing agency for the success of the project.

In all, 147 farmer leaders from the 49 groups were trained in areas such as, Mind-set transformation, accounting and finance, production and value addition, marketing as well as internal and external cooperatives.

The training would form part of the first batch of farmer leaders trained under the component of the project to ensure farmers are adequately equipped with the needed knowledge to help their business to strive.

The FBOs/FBCs project comprised of six major components including; Cooperative Policy Advisory, Training of Trainers (TOT), Training of FBOs/FBCs leaders (TOL), Overseas Invitational Training in Korea, Networking and Marketing Support, as well as support for the Pilot Projects.

Mr Frederick Addo-Yobo, the Project Officer said the training was intended to help farmers to develop their own action plans and to ensure farmers were provided with the needed technical and financial support to be able to implement those business plans.

He indicated that, the training also formed part of the first batch of farmers to receive training as a major component of the project, saying, '210 groups are expected to benefit from the training by the end of the project in 2020'.