Improving Institutional Capacity:
Strengthening Farmer Organizations in the OIC Member Countries
37
3. Case Studies of Farmer Organizations across OIC Member Countries
Introduction
This section profiles five diverse farmer organizations from across the OIC in order to (i)
ground any discussion of FO challenges and (ii) deepen understanding of policy’s practical
implications. The FOs are found in four countries, including two in the Africa region (Senegal
and Uganda), one in the Asian region (Indonesia), and one in the Arab region (Morocco).
Additionally, these cases span a mixture of local, national, and sub-national farmer
organizations in order to provide an in-depth look at the similarities and differences of OIC
FOs’ structures, goals and activities. The cases highlight a variety of business models from
Section including producer groups, federations, agricultural cooperatives, and commodity
organizations, along with a women’s cooperative.
Methodology
Each case study involved several days of structured interviews with leaders of the farmer
organization, along with site visits to farmer organization headquarters and field locations.
Structured interviews were also conducted with officials and experts within the country to
understand the policy environment.
The structured interviews with FO leaders used a customized questionnaire intended to assess
the performance of their organizations. This questionnaire was adapted from a profiling tool
originally created by Dalberg in partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and
used for several years to better understand and measure farmer organizations’ capacity levels,
constraints and priority areas for intervention.57 Assessment using the tool is based a number
of indicators in two overarching categories: Organizational set-up and Impact capacity.
Organizational set-up consists of three sub-categories (Representation, Governance and
Business Fundamentals) and Impact capacity consists of three more (Strategic Potential,
Technical Assistance and Other Services and Economic Gains).
In order to score and assess performance based on these metrics, a set of questions is asked for
each of the six categories, with responses scoring different numbers of points according to
their link with strong farmer organizations. Final performance levels for the FO are
determined by these scores. Indicator scores range from 0 to 1, based on the number of points
the FO receives for that indicator calculated as a percentage of the total possible points for the
same indicator. For example, the Business Fundamentals category contains 27 possible points,
so an organization scoring 15 points would be shown as 0.56. Each farmer organization is thus
scored in 6 different categories, and for ease of understanding, these 6 scores are shown
graphically below the FO scorecards in the sections that follow.
Then, the average of Organizational Setup and Impact Capacity generates the aggregate score
with weighted averages attributed to sub-categories. The weighting is based on the total
number of possible points - for example, Governance, Business Fundamentals, and Technical
Assistance were weighted more heavily than other categories because of their relative
importance in a given FO’s ability to participate in markets at scale. Throughout the results, a
higher numerical rating indicates greater strength and a lower numerical rating indicates less
strength. Full details on the tool, and the exact wording of the questions used, are given in
Annex 2.
57 The original tool was created for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2011.