The Memorandum of Understanding between the ACP-EU Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA), AGRICORD and the Pan African Farmers Organisation (PAFO) is on “Strategic Partnership Supporting capacity development of African Farmer’s Organizations through improved Policies, Technologies and Capabilities” (2016-2018).
The proposed partnership between PAFO, CTA and AgriCord together with other partners aims at contributing to expand and upscale successes in inclusive and successful business models led by farmers’ organisations in collaboration with other value chain actors and SMEs. To achieve this, it looks also at promoting the use of various forms of data as well as information and communication technologies (ICTs) by farmers’ organizations. A key area will be supporting capacity building on agribusiness management and business skills, critical for FOs members (including youth and women in agribusiness) to encourage entrepreneurship and innovation.
The objective of this MoU is to support PAFO, its 5 regional members and their national members regarding data collection and use, with regard to smart farming, precision agriculture to improve FO’s position in supply and marketing sides of value chains, with special attention for youth.
PAFO and its 5 regional members, AgriCord and CTA propose to develop a strategic technical and financial partnership which will focus on critical areas for the future of African agriculture and African farmers leveraging opportunities for farmer’s organisations to enhance their impact. This will be done through:
- Supporting inclusive agribusiness development to capture new market opportunities for farmers to move up the value chain and increase farmer’s revenues.
- Supporting the organizational and entrepreneurship capacities of FOs and support institutions.
- Case showing and up-scaling entrepreneurial successes in agribusiness and technology transfer
- Promoting increased generation and use of data from farmers and supporting membership registration
- Building strong farmers-led Monitoring and Evaluation frameworks supporting FOs governance
- Developing of collective learning spaces
- Promoting smart farming, including an increased knowledge of precision farming, especially for young farmers and entrepreneurs as well as enhancing business skills
- Partnership building and fundraising on Smart Farming and ‘Big Data’ for farmers
- Supporting of internal and external communication activities