We conduct research with farmers
We jointly test and apply the Enabling Rural Innovation (ERI) approach through which farmers transition from traditional subsistence farming to market-oriented organic agriculture. Farmers become entrepreneurs with capabilities in participatory planning, market research, experimentation, monitoring & evaluation and enterprise development.
Linking farmers to organic markets (F2M I)
'Linking farmers to markets. Developing sustainable innovation systems to improve the competitiveness of smallholder organic agriculture' (F2M I) was the pilot project of the GoOrganic Initiative (2003-2007). The idea was to support farmer groups in Uganda and Mozambique in transitioning from traditional subsistence to commercial organic agriculture. This was the first time where the ERI approach was tested in an organic agriculture context.
The ERI approach is now successfully applied by the pilot farmer groups and NGO partners in three different agro-ecological and socio-economic environments in Uganda and Mozambique. Farmers were empowered to collect market information on promising organic commodities, to test new crop varieties for food and income security, and to plan collective marketing strategies that increase their competitiveness on national and international organic markets. Project experiences showed that the ERI approach is highly useful for empowering farmers to become more active decision makers within the growing organic sector.
Going to scale (F2M II)
'Going to scale: Developing strategies for scaling out market-oriented organic agriculture from farmer to group to association level' is the second generation continuation of the F2M I project (2007-2010). The goal of the project is to generate new knowledge on how smallholder farmers can effecitively, and efficiently, engage in food security and market-oiented agriculture and how they can be organised into groups and second order associations to generate economies of scale in access to organic input and output markets.
