Publications

Information about extension and new methodologies for implementation is often scattered and presented in complex academic language. Practitioners, who often have very limited time and/or may only have basic formal education, find it difficult to make use of this information. The Global Good Practices Initiative aims to bridge this gap by providing information about extension approaches and methods in easy-to-understand formats.

Rural advisory services (RAS) can play an important role in addressing gender inequalities. However, RAS programmes have often fallen short of expectations to design and implement relevant services to help rural women and men achieve food security and generate more income. This paper is based on an examination of a broad selection of existing literature on gender-sensitive RAS. It looks at gender-differentiated barriers in access to RAS and explores the challenges of effectively targeting women family farmers when delivering these services.

The study reflects on previous World Bank and FAO reports that made the general recommendation to set both research and extension investment targets in developing countries at 1% of agricultural gross domestic product (AgGDP). In order to define proxies for country-specific extension investment targets, authors developed an extension investment model (EIM) based on socio-economic macro-indicators (poverty, undernourishment, access to information and population density) and a method to define estimates for cost increases related to climate change.

The FAO Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean has been working in support of family farming with its member countries, forming a network of experts with over a hundred participants from 33 countries in the region. This book systematizes experiences and lessons to contribute to the dialogue and formulation of public policies to address the challenges faced by family farmers, highlighting experiences and projects that strengthened the management of their organizations, the sustainable intensification of production and the access to markets and value chains.

This series was developed to help extension workers provide support to farmers in dealing with the new challenges that arise from market-oriented farming. The aim is to contribute to building their capacity and skills in farm management and through them, the capacity and skills of the farmers with whom they work. The intention is to help farmers understand why they make the choices they make and how they can improve their decision making skills.

This guide has been prepared for agricultural extension workers to introduce them to some of the principles of economics that are relevant to smallholder farming and in particular market-oriented farming. The reader will gain a basic understanding of some of the terms and concepts used in economics and relate them to the day-to-day decisions that farmers make. The aim of this guide is to build skills that will enable extension workers to assist farmers make the kinds of farm management decisions that lead to greater farm profitability.

This guide is intended to help extension workers better understand the concept of risk, the situations where risk occurs and management strategies that can be used to reduce, or at least soften its effect. It is hoped that the guide will be useful in assisting extension workers to provide farmers with advice on the kind of risk management strategies that they can employ to deal with risk in their day-to-day farming operations.

This guide has been prepared to provide a better understanding of benchmarking in farm management extension. It explains clearly what benchmarking is, discusses what to benchmark, suggests a series of steps which may be followed and shows ways to apply these to the process in the field. It introduces the concepts of profitability and efficiency as indicators of farm business performance, examines those indicators and applies them to work in the field. The guide explains also some diagnostic techniques that can be of use to identify problems of the farm business and resulting cause and effect relationships.