Project: Enhancing Small holder farmer voice for Agriculture development through participatory Governance and Accountability (IJWIRY’UMUHINZI).

The Project was implemented by RDO in partnership with InterAction that funded the Project. The Project’s aim was to build capacities to farmer organizations and the local leaders so that farmer organizations have knowledge and confidence to take initiative and demand space in public planning processes and on the other hand local leaders have tools and skills to better involve farmers in participatory planning.  The project also intended strengthen farmer and duty bearer’s engagement both at local and national levels through evidence -based dialogue   The project also put up a mechanism of agricultural related data collection and analysis and sharing of lessons learnt and best practices for improved agricultural development. The Project was initiated basing on   Rwanda Governance Board (RGB) annual Citizen Report Card especially 2018 report which showed that the national average level of satisfaction by farmers on agriculture services stood at 49.4%. which is very low compared to other sectors?   The project targeted 2 districts of Kayonza and Nyagatare that were at the bottom of the table in terms of the level of satisfaction by farmers on agriculture services where Kayonza stood at 42.25% and Nyagatare 42.50% both being much below the national average. The Project beneficiaries were Farmer Organizations (FOs) and in total were 42 farmer organizations; 24 Farmer organizations in Nyagatare District and 18 Farmer organizations in Kayonza District.

Project objectives:

• To increase capacity of Farmer organizations to engage in planning and budgeting and ability to use a collective approach to effectively influence agricultural decisions
• Enhance will and capacity of local authorities to engage and respond to priorities expressed by farmer organizations related to agricultural development
• Promote the use of data to inform stakeholder engagement
• Share gained experience, lessons learnt and best practices to local and national actors

Rwanda development organization (RDO) started implementation of IJWI RY’UMUHINZI interventions in October,2020 clustered around 3 main components namely: (i) advocacy, (ii) promote use of data to inform stakeholder Engagement and, (iii) share gained experience and networking. Hence, this report elaborated activities implemented in the two years of the project, as well as the key achievements, lesson learnt, and areas for further engagements.

Conclusion

In the 15 months RDO implemented the IJWI RY’UMUHINZI project, was able to build capacity of Famer organizations in Kayonza and Nyagatare in understanding the importance and their role in participation in local planning and budgeting and can demand the space. On the other the project has also empowered local authorities to understand the priorities of the farmers and how to better engage them in planning and budgeting processes for sustainable agriculture development.   The challenges were issue of COVID-19, The project coverage and time period were relatively small to give significant impact.