CSD attends FAO and SEWA National Workshop on Sharing Grassroots Development Experiences in Agriculture
CSD were invited to participate in a one day workshop delivered
in partnership by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and
SEWA on the outskirts of Delhi in March 2010. The FAO had
been inspired by a five day field visit to SEWA’s projects to share
what they found from these visits and explore potential next steps
with a wider group. NGOs, civil society organisations, employers,
researchers and policy officials were invited to participate in
this event.
One of the most interesting aspects of the
workshop was the contribution of SEWA’s members – the women
smallholders. The women spoke about some exactly the same
issues they had identified in the course of CSD’s research for
Training for Rural Development. In particular, SEWA
members spoke about the need for long term
- FAO want to pull together a
publication on international good practice in rural
development (thus far, they found all the same things as
T4RD). I was sitting next to Denis Herbel at FAO who is responsible
for this publication - he has our report and will keep consulting
us.
- FAO and SEWA to develop a
database of SEWA's 1.3m members. Also World
Agricultural Census takes place this year. They hope these sources
of information will help the Govt of India understand how many are
taking up govt training/employment schemes, their impact, issues of
land/capital ownership, etc. Data v important as rural women fairly
invisible in policy terms.
- There will be FAO pilots and field
studies on integrated approach to farm-market linkages,
credit and investment, farmer field school models and junior farmer
field and life schools - again, have contact details for these
people, explained our work and they keen to include us as and
when.
- FICCI (industry rep) suggested
that there is a need to certificate the skills
women/farmers have. They working on small projects in rural dev,
again I have contact details to find out more.
- FAO questioned whether it would be advisable
to set up secure agricultural economic zones.
There was no agreement from the attendees on the advantages of this
- the larger problems of access to credit dominated the
meeting.
- The purpose of the meeting was to start a
‘policy dialogue’ but the only policy
representative in attendance was a Professor from the Agriculture
Research Centre (and he only attended for 2 hours). At that point I
was asked to input and could say we were visiting MoLE, Ministry of
Rural Dev, World Bank and ILO this visit and they all very
interested in development for rural women - so the opportunity to
influence is there I suggested. I then explained the T4RD research
and it went down really well.