The Swedish Co-operative Centre made a deliberate decision to promote the emergence of Farm forestry member based organizations, this has been necessitated by the smallholder forest producers’ limited organizational capacity for dialogue and appropriate business development, financial services in support of sustainable smallholder farm-forestry business, and their limited power to participate and compete in the open market and make their voice heard in national forest policy developments.
Key efforts towards the above had been the concluded pilot project which was finalized in a seminar in May 2011. The seminar brought together Kenyan smallholder forest producers’ associations with various partners/stakeholders including; Government representation Kenya Forestry Service-KFS, Kenya Forest Research Institute – KEFRI, Kenyan Farmer Federation-KENFAP, African Forest Forum, Forest Action Network –FAN, VI Forestry Swedish Smallholders Forest Farmer Association, Civil Society, The Embassy of Finland, the World Bank, funding partners such as FAO and SIDA/Forest Initiative.
This was a unique opportunity for small holder forest farmers associations to have a direct dialogue with policy makers and to interact. There was an open and trustful atmosphere created where true opinions could be expressed with chances of getting direct responses. It was also an excellent moment to summarize the outcomes of the project and see ways forward.
Consequent to the foregoing, SCC supported the Project Planning (LFA) Workshop for National Farm Agroforestry Producers Association of Kenya which was facilitated by FIT Resources and attended by stakeholders at Pride Inn – Nairobi – Kenya on September 24th – 25th, 2012. 20 participants attended drawn amongst 8 organizations. Staff of SCC/VI also attended the workshop.
Through facilitation FIT Resources was able to achieve the following: