Giving farmers and their organizations a stronger voice

Farmer and producer organizations are, by and large, local associations that represent family farms. They are not connected to official agricultural information systems, so often develop their own.

There are drawbacks to current agricultural information systems, not least that family-farmer organizations are not decision-makers when it comes to the design and implementation of data systems and have no direct access to them. WAW aims to forge strong partnerships and bolster family-farmer organizations by increasing their capacity for data generation and analysis. In this way, family-farmer organizations and farmers themselves will be the primary beneficiaries of the WAW initiative, as they will reap the rewards of investment policies tailored to their particular type of farm.

WAW has forged strong ties with the Asian Farmers Association (AFA, a federation of 20 national family-farmer platforms across Asia) and Réseau des organisations paysannes et de producteurs de l'Afrique de l'Ouest (ROPPA, an alliance of 14 national family-farmer platforms in West Africa). It plans to step up its partnership with REAF (a platform spanning seven member and associate countries in Mercosur).