Volunteer farmer trainers are helping dairy farmers in East Africa increase milk yields, but how can we make sure they remain doing this important work.

An article in the Guardian’s Farming and Food Security Hub reports on successes from the East Africa Dairy Development (EADD) project which makes use of volunteer farmer trainers to disseminate technologies to farmers in their own and nearby communities. Such technologies include how to grow improved fodder shrubs, feed conservation techniques such as silage making, hay baling, and management of crop residues. The trainers supplement the over-stretched extension system in the region.

In the health sector, high rates of attrition are a key challenge with community health workers. So, how can the volunteer farmer training scheme prevent this? Earlier this year, an in-depth study into the program analyzed the motivations of its participants.

Volunteer farmers are recruited through a community-based process based on criteria presented by both EADD and the community itself. As Steve Franzel, principal agricultural economist with the World Agroforestry Centre says "they have to be resident in the community, be dairy farmers, and interested in helping others."

The study found that volunteer farmer trainers are motivated beyond income generation. Their motivations included altruism, social factors and access to training. But the opportunity to earn income from selling planting materials or providing training services – for a fee – to people from outside their immediate community has helped them to stay in the game.

The program has an 80 per cent retention rate, explained by its strategy to provide financial incentive mechanisms and set up its volunteer farmer trainers as entrepreneurs for knowledge and information sharing and technological transfer within communities.

Although Franzel notes that volunteer farmer training programs don’t work everywhere in every circumstance, he believes “it's been way underexploited”.

The EADD project has been running since 2008 as a collaborative effort between Heifer International, the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), Technoserve, the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), and African Breeders Services (ABS). Between 2009 and 2012, the volume of milk sold by farmers involved in the EADD increased by 102 per cent.

Read the full story: Milking it: dairy farmers in east Africa are earning more by learning more

Download the study:

Kiptot E, Franzel S (2014). Voluntarism as an investment in human, social and financial capital: evidence from a farmer-to-farmer extension program in Kenya. Agriculture and Human Values 31:2 pp 231-243.

See also:

Volunteer farmers transforming East Africa's dairy sector

Fodder for a better future: How agroforestry is helping to transform the lives of small-scale dairy farmers in East Africa (pdf)