Improving Institutional Capacity:

Strengthening Farmer Organizations in the OIC Member Countries

Table 8: Major Yemeni policy interventions and their link to FO capacity challenges

Capacity Gap/Challenges Intervention

Policy-related

Represent the interests of FOs in national, regional and global fora.

Formulating policy to plan production based on labor market

demand

Technical:

Production

(Input

Supply

and

Marketing)

Support agricultural cooperatives in the production and marketing

of agriculture produce by supplying subsidized inputs and

machinery

Institutional/Managerial

(Organizational)

Provide education to cooperative members and training for staff

and management

Institutional/Managerial

(Financial)

Providing capacity development to cooperatives in the area of

financial management, planning and project development

According to the ILO, the majority of FOs in Yemen are male-dominated with little managerial

participation by women. However, the Yemeni cooperative law seeks to bolster female

participation in FOs and stipulates that a minimum capital input of 500,000 Yemeni Rials is

needed to establish women’s cooperatives – less than what is required to set up male-only

cooperatives.

However, this provision is still viewed by the ILO as having limitations. In many

cases, the ILO reports, this smaller amount is still beyond the reach of many poor rural women,

further entrenching their exclusion from entrepreneurial activity.

2.2.2.

Actions by intra-OIC bodies in support of Farmer Organizations

In addition to the national-level policy interventions described above, a number of regional

bodies are active within the OIC in strengthening agricultural systems, in general, and FOs, in

particular. Some of these bodies are examined below, accompanied by examples of their FO-

related work, in order to illustrate the types of bodies that OIC Member Countries potentially

can coordinate with in their efforts to strengthen FOs.

The

Islamic Development Bank (IDB)

has invested US$4bn over 39 years to develop

agriculture in its member countries, which include all OIC member countries but Guyana. The

first phase of IDB’s Jeddah Declaration, approved in 2008 and amounting to US$20m, provides

agricultural inputs to smallholder famers and access to services, improved infrastructure and

strengthens agricultural institutions.

One very recent example of an IDB-funded activity in

support of farmer organizations is found in Cameroon, where the IDB is funding the Livestock

and Fisheries Development Project, which puts farmer organizations and networks at the

center of efforts to develop the livestock industry. This project, launched in late 2014, is

intended to set up three dairy cooperatives, organize poultry producers into networks for

This table summarizes and draws on the same sources cited in the preceding paragraphs

Ibid

Islamic Development Bank, “39 Years in Development” report, 2013