The Small Farmers, Big Change workshop held in Oxford 12-14 May was a major learning opportunity bringing together 45 participants from 18 countries and three Oxfam affiliates (Oxfam GB, Oxfam America and Oxfam India). Five external speakers also shared inputs drawing on their experiences in DFID and a variety of research institutions and other NGOs.

Contact phd@oxfam.org.uk for a copy of the full report or more information about presentations to the event.

1. New context: Consensus around

agriculture’s contribution to growth The current context offers new challenges with the probable scarcity of food, water & fossil fuels, climate change and globalisation, not only of markets, but also of recession, diseases, and carbon reduction commitments. After many years of declining investment, there has been a renewed surge of interest in agriculture as part of the solution. This is not just the case in agriculturally based economies, but also in transitional ones, where there are 1530 million poor rural people.1 In these economies, agricultural development is critical in addressing the urban-rural income gap and in providing food for growing urban populations. As part of this growing consensus on the central role that smallholder agriculture plays in economic growth and poverty reduction, there are rapidly increasing commitments to agricultural investment from governments and donors and growing interest within the private sector in engaging with smallholders.

2. What is scale? Scaling up does not

mean more or bigger projects Farming households typically invest around $300 per year (in own labour and inputs) in their farming.2 In contrast, total donor aid to agriculture averages around $20 per household and Oxfam’s own agricultural expenditure is less than $0.05 per person among the 1.5 billion rural poor.3 Investment from the private sector and other market system actors is likely to be much more significant. Therefore, our service delivery capacity is extremely limited; we will only have an impact at scale if we are very strategic in our interventions and focus on influencing others and leveraging wider change and investment.

What this means for Oxfam? In the current context, our focus needs to shift from convincing external audiences of the importance of agricultural development and smallholder agriculture in particular, to: • Identifying how to most effectively leverage wider

change for smallholder farmers in different contexts, with a more nuanced understanding of different ‘rural worlds’

• Demonstrating effective business models that maximise the benefits to smallholder farmers, especially women and contribute to economic growth;

• Ensuring that our interventions equip smallholder farmers for the future e.g. by incorporating climate analysis, focusing on low-input agriculture as input costs rise and avoiding asset depletion.

The Agricultural Scale Up initiative in Honduras has supported smallholders to get better prices for exported coffee as well as leveraging government poverty reduction investment to develop rural infrastructure. Photo: Gilvan Barreto/Oxfam

Scaling our approach to smallholder

agriculture: a summary of learning

What this means for Oxfam? • Scaling-up does not imply simply multiplying the

number of Oxfam agricultural ‘projects’ or investing in bigger programmes – it is about doing things in different ways to achieve more profound change that impacts on more people.

• Leveraging investments from national and local governments, private sector and other market actors including rural households, is as, if not more, important than increasing donor aid budgets. To be replicable, pilot agricultural interventions should not rely on donor investment much above $20 per household per year4

• Scaling up involves working in different ways and with different alliances, which are likely to change over time. It requires Oxfam to ‘let go’ of the process and let others drive changes. This in turn needs mechanisms to track change at scale, which may not be directly attributable to Oxfam.

3. Our approach: Focusing on the

most strategic pathways to scale A key learning point was that it is important for Oxfam to know our limits. Influencing change doesn’t mean doing everything ourselves, but it does mean identifying the most relevant strategies for different contexts, understanding who or what are the drivers of change and how we can work with these effectively. The workshop highlighted the following four pathways through which Oxfam GB works to achieve scale in smallholder agricultural development

The achievement of scale can be understood in different ways, there are absolute quantitative measures of impact (e.g. reaching 6.6m smallholders) and - as important - qualitative measures around policy change, or changes in ideas and beliefs about or in the aspirations of smallholders. The workshop highlighted a number of Oxfam supported initiatives with potential for “scalability.” Scaling up happens most successfully through demand driven, or self-spreading processes, with NGOs or other facilitators exiting early on (See figure 1). Some examples of “scaling” are: growth of new business models: franchising, increased investment, adoption of business models by new companies; farmer-to-farmer spread of new technologies or production practices; institutional and policy changes across municipalities, regions, states or countries; increased public sector investment in effective models of service delivery or private sector innovation in service delivery such as mobile banking.

1. Farmer organisation (for advocacy and for enterprise)

2. Influencing policy and investment decisions in favour of smallholders

3. Engagement of smallholders in markets and value chains

4. Innovation in service delivery (including extension, business development, & financial services)

Figure 1: elements of scale

Period of self-spread

Early NGO exit

Global shift in thinking

Self-sustaining initiative

Women in Bundhelkand, India lobby for their community’s rights over fishing ponds. Photo: Rajendra Shaw

Cutting across these pathways are efforts to ensure that scale is achieved inclusively and work to analyse and mitigate against the risks that smallholders face, whether these are posed by their existing context or by new ways of working that we are encouraging them to adopt.

Diagram 2: pathways to scale

Farmer organisation is an area where Oxfam can demonstrate a lot of success. It is also a growing area of interest as increased budgets for agriculture mean successful, yet fragile farmer organisations are being sought out by development actors and donors requiring partners with the capacity for grassroots delivery. This brings the danger of producer organisations being overloaded and weakened by donor-driven initiatives. Oxfam’s learning highlights the need to be clear about the different type of organisation and support required for advocacy, enterprise development, and service-delivery and to ensure that our support to farmer organisations is cost-effective, sustainable and replicable.

Research from Regoverning Markets5 suggests that land distribution is a critical factor in determining the inclusivity of agricultural market restructuring. Smallholders are less likely to be able to compete with larger farmers during agricultural modernisation in places where there are significant numbers of large landowners and assets are unequally distributed. This indicates the value of work focusing on land

Leveraging change in

smallholder agriculture

Balancing risk, diversity and scale

Facilitating smallholder engagement in markets and value chains

Innovation in services for rural smallholders

Farmer organisation

Influencing policy and investment decisions

rights in contexts where this is not yet the case and on agricultural labourers6 where it is. The workshop highlighted the need to balance efforts to develop new vertically contracted value chains led by private sector organisations with the development of national food markets where many smallholders currently earn most of their income. An example from Ethiopia showed Oxfam supporting beekeepers to develop their ability to sell both to local markets and an international company as well as links being made between cash for work social protection schemes and the construction of infrastructure for value chain development. Diversifying markets and preventing asset depletion through social protection are important risk management measures. Oxfam’s organisational expertise in gender equality is also increasingly being applied to our work in developing market-based livelihoods. “Gendered market mapping” that enables us to select markets with significant potential for women’s economic leadership is an approach to programme design that is currently being piloted and attracted a lot of attention at the event. A key learning is that this needs to be an explicit objective of our programmes from the start.

Dairy producers in Haiti are part-owners of Let Agogo a franchise business with branches across the country. Suzi O'Keefe/Oxfam.

Private sector engagement in Ethiopia has enabled beekeepers to access international markets. Crispin Hughes/

What this means for Oxfam? Some propositions for areas where Oxfam could focus its work based on learning from the event: • Oxfam should continue to develop its role as a

facilitator, in brokering the involvement of the private sector, in convening and supporting advocacy movements and developing farmer organisations. Undertaking power analysis, building trust and identifying win-win outcomes are crucial to this.

• Where smallholders are unlikely to be competitive in agribusiness, Oxfam should focus more heavily on labour rights for agricultural workers and/or government investment and farmer organization that will enable smallholders to strengthen supply local food markets.

• Where smallholders can be competitive in vertically contracted value chains, we should include an explicit focus on gender in selection of markets and on identifying key leverage points for women’s economic leadership.

• Oxfam should invest more in analyzing and managing risk to ensure that other vulnerable groups (e.g. pastoralists or agricultural workers) are not disadvantaged by our work and that smallholders avoid asset depletion.

4. Our capacity: new ways of

working and staff skills are critical

success factors for scale Oxfam is one of many actors who are trying to create change for smallholders. Our ability to invest directly is limited so we must facilitate and influence others to leverage wider change. This requires a different approach and different skills in comparison to the traditional partner driven model of delivering services. It requires skills in analysis, networking and influencing including specifically in understanding market and political dynamics and working with the private sector. It means thinking opportunistically and using levers for change. The type of results and timeframe for delivery may also be different to traditional programmes with changes less directly attributable to Oxfam’s work. Management understanding and support of this approach is essential to success in achieving scale.

What this means for Oxfam? • Oxfam should develop expertise in areas where

we can add value and shift thinking globally. This means investing in focused programming, evidence collection and external influencing on agriculture.

• Oxfam should recruit more staff with the capacity to identify opportunities for change, analyse conditions and adapt strategies to different contexts, to engage at multiple levels, convening alliances and multi-stakeholder processes and to facilitate sustainable change.

• Rigorous evidence is needed to convince key people both inside and outside Oxfam of what works in leveraging change in smallholder agriculture. However effective M&E can be challenging in scaled-up work involving multiple actors: we need to work on appropriate tools and communication strategies to show evidence of impact targeting business actors as well as more traditional partners.

Endnotes 1. World Development Report, 2008. Poor rural people in agrarian economies number 278 million. 2. Estimate by Mike Albu in his workshop presentation – other estimates vary. 3. Oxfam spends £50m a year on its livelihoods programme – of which a substantial portion goes to support small farmers 4. This figure may vary quite significantly from country to country. 5. Bill Vorley, IIED, 2009, presentation to SFBC learning event 6. Perhaps 1/3 of the 2.5 billion people worldwide involved in agriculture are agricultural labourers: an extremely significant

number of poor people.

In Mali, Oxfam is supporting cooperatives to provide services that lessen producers’ dependence on cotton. Special activities, including literacy training help women play more active roles in these organisations. Photo: Helen Palmer/Oxfam

How to find out more? This is a summary of a longer report from the Small Farmers, Big Change! meeting. In addition, articles and presentations documenting the experiences of 13 Oxfam programmes were produced for the Small Farmers, Big Change meeting and a number of external resource people prepared presentations for each of the themes addressed. You can download these from Oxfam GB intranet or request a copy of a Small Farmers, Big Change CD Rom from phd@oxfam.org.uk.