Institutionalization of the Volunteer Farmer Trainer Approach in Dairy Producer Organizations in Kenya

Agricultural extension is important in disseminating information reducing poverty and promoting agricultural development in most developing countries. In the past top-down public sector-driven model of extension was commonly used for information dissemination. The model however was ineffective because of various reasons such as limited resources (few staff and shortage of funds) hence its inability to reach a substantial number of farmers especially the poor smallholder farmers living in remote and mountainous regions (Dalsgaard et al. 2005). This called for introduction of alternative extension paradigms that moved away from top-down to participatory approaches that are farmer focused and private extension systems composed of private companies non-governmental community-based and faith-based organizations (Nambiro et al. 2006; Rees et al. 2000). While several benefits have been reported on the use of participatory extension approaches (Birkhaeuser et al. 1991; Alston et al. 2000) it is evident that ensuring the sustainability of the approaches remains a great challenge (Rivera and Alex 2004; Feder et al. 2010).

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