Project News

Facilitators' Training for Farmers' Demand Driven Extension (FT-FaDDE) training was conducted!

Happy New Year!

In Kenya, the positive rate for new infections and tests has risen sharply of COVID-19 during the New Year holidays, but the situation settled down in mid-January. The general election to select members of parliament, governor, county, etc. is scheduled for 2022 in Kenya, but the Project will proceed with the activities while wishing that there will be no major confusion.

The Project conducted the first training in 2022 in Mombasa for four days from 24th to 27th January. The training is targeting for county extension officers to learn the basic crop production techniques of selected crops by the target farmer groups of Kilifi and Kitui Counties based on the information obtained from the market survey.

In the training, the Project first introduces the 20 crop production techniques recommended by the Project. Crop production is divided into 1) pre-cultivation, 2) land preparation, 3) crop establishment, 4) crop management, 5) harvest, (6) post-harvest handling, and (7) cost & income analysis. After that, the Project explains the specific crop production techniques for the crops selected by the farmer groups. Regarding the techniques for each crop, the extension officers who are in positions to visit the farmer's group and actually give guidance after this training listened to the presentation in a serious manner, and there were many questions and answers.

In addition, in order to reduce the budget, the demonstration was significantly reduced in this training, and the training was set to 4 days, which is one day less than before. While there was an evaluation that "all lectures were important based on the needs of farmers", there was an opinion from the participants that "I want to go out to the field and increase practical programs". Based on the voices of the participants, the Project plans to consider a better training program.

The tablets provided last year have also been used more. There were extension officers who accessed the Network Attached Storage (NAS) and took lectures while viewing the downloaded training materials on a tablet. After the training, the evaluation questionnaire is submitted online by using a tablet, eliminating the need for collection and aggregation.

Next, extension officers who participated in this training will carry out in field training to directly instruct farmers.

FT-FaDDE Training

Participants refers the materials in the Tablet