The Development Fund, Norway (DF) has, in collaboration with local partners in Malawi, been implementing different programs; Malawi and Zambia (MAZA) program (2012 – 2016), Malawi and Mozambique (MAMO) program (2017 – ongoing) and the Sustainable Agriculture Lead Farmer Program (SALFP) 2014 – ongoing, where the Lead Farmer (LF) model has been the main modality for extension and implementation. DF has developed a Lead Farmer extension and training guide on sustainable agriculture that is used to train all LFs.

The Development Fund has commissioned an impact evaluation from the FNI of the Lead Farmer approach in extension. The main users of the evaluation are the Development Fund, partners and the Royal Norwegian Embassy who will use the learnings from the evaluation to guide the development of future projects and programs.

The evaluation will examine the implementation and impact of the Lead Farmer approach across the DF programs, focusing on the period from 2014 to date. At the core of the evaluation are questions such as how the lead farmers are able to transfer knowledge to their follower farmers; the particular role of women in this context and how the model has helped in scaling out technologies through follower farmers.

The evaluation will also assess the adoption rate of various climate smart agriculture technologies by the LFs and FFs and analyze this in further depth. The evaluation will furthermore compare the LF approach with the formal Government extension approach, and other extension approaches (electronic and print media, farmers field school, etc), to the extent relevant and possible. Moreover, the evaluation will answer a range of other questions related to the relevance, impact and sustainability of the model.

Project period: 2019

 

FNI PROJECT LEADER

  • Research Director, Biodiversity and Natural Resources
    +47 95118037

    Email

    randersen@fni.no
    Show Email
FUNDING

Development Fund, Norway

OTHER PUBLICATIONS

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