Improving Institutional Capacity:
Strengthening Farmer Organizations in the OIC Member Countries
6
of indicators in two overarching categories; organizational set-up, and impact capacity.
Organizational set-up was broken down into three sub-categories (Representation,
Governance and Business Fundamentals) and Impact capacity was broken down into a further
three (Strategic Potential, Technical Assistance and Other Services and Economic Gains).
During these visits, meetings were also held with policymakers and civil society experts to
understand the policy environment.
The study combines findings on practices and frameworks typically used to strengthen FOs
with the experiences and suggestions from actual farmer organizations within the OIC to
highlight areas ripe for engagement by OIC Member Countries.
The outline of the study is as follows:
 Section 1 presents a brief overview of important concepts in understanding FOs,
including a discussion of the types of FOs, their typical functions and impact, and the
archetypical challenges they face.
 Section 2 looks at FOs in OIC member states, assessing enabling environments and
market structure, and in particular the penetration of FOs in various OIC states. The
chapter discusses OIC public policy towards FOs, with a focus on five countries, and
also assesses the actions of intra-OIC bodies aimed at strengthening farmer
organizations. This section also addresses the topic of financial sector developments
aimed at farmer organizations in OIC member countries.
 Section 3 is a collection of case studies in selected OIC member countries. The selected
countries are Uganda (Kitenge Agali Awamu Coffee Company), Senegal (Consultation
Framework for Groundnuts Producers), Morocco (Tighanimine Filahia Argan Oil
Cooperative) and Indonesia (Indonesian Peasants Union and the Consortium for
Agrarian Reform).
 Section 4 highlights recent trends in strengthening farmer organizations worldwide.
This chapter assesses basic principles of strong FOs, provides examples of
development actors working to strengthen FOs and their typical strategies, plus
examples of successful pro-FO institutional frameworks and legal principles. The
section concludes with two global case studies of successful FOs, a national-scale body
in Zambia and a local body in Peru.
 Section 5 concludes with some suggestions on policies and actions as well as areas for
OIC Member Countries to encourage cooperation among themselves and between the
OIC and outside groups.
 Annex 1 provides country-by-country data points for the enabling environment and
market structure related to farmer organizations in the OIC, providing more details on
the questions discussed in Section 2.
 Annex 2 provides and explains the full Farmer Organization Profiling Tool used to
profile the five FOs featured in Section 3, which is intended to be used as a resource for
future research in this area. Questions and scoring weights are given, along with tables
comparing the relative performance of each FO in each category.