Godrick Khisa wins Justus von Liebig Award for World Nutrition 2009

WAGENINGEN, 16 October 2009 - Godrick Khisa, a Farmer Field School specialist from Kenya, has received on the occasion of the World Food Day today, the Justus von Liebig Award for World Nutrition 2009. The FFS Foundation congratulates Godrick with this prize and thanks the selection committee for selecting a "field person" for the prize. This prize will be a great source of encouragement to all those involved in the Farmer Field School movement, demonstrating what they are doing is receiving international recognition.

Through his work in empowering small-scale farmers to find their own solutions to the problems that confront them, Godrick Khisa has made a hugely significant impact on food security, on the sustainable management of natural resources and on the self-respect of rural people, not only in his own country, Kenya, but throughout East Africa and beyond. He has made a fundamental contribution to the creation of the "FFS movement" that is steadily expanding to improve the livelihoods of very large numbers of small-scale farmers throughout the Continent.

Godrick's achievement has been to introduce Farmer Field Schools (FFS) to Kenya in 1995; to adapt the methodology, originally developed in Asia for Integrated Pest Management in rice, to respond to local farming conditions and needs; to persist, often in the face of opposition from the "establishment", in engaging more and more people in the FFS movement; and to work tirelessly in sharing this experience with other countries.

One of the features of the FFS "movement" is that it is, in itself, continuously learning from its own experience. Thus, most schools involve farmer-run experiments, the results of which are shared with other farmers and officials during field days. Kenyan farmers created a "self financing" model in which they would collectively work on a "commercial" plot during the first year so as to generate income that would then be used to finance a continuation in the following years, so that they were no longer dependent on outside financial assistance: this has now been widely adopted in East Africa. Increasingly FFS are being facilitated by farmers who themselves are FFS graduates, thus keeping costs low (less expenditure on vehicles and fuel), and enabling the movement to expand without being constrained by the limited number of trained extensionists. And networks are emerging spontaneously between FFS where they come together especially for the purposes of bulk buying of inputs and of marketing production surpluses.

Godrick Khisa has made a tremendously important and sustained contribution to the FFS programmes in East Africa, as a "master trainer" since 1995, and particular in his role as project coordinator for a national FFS programme in Kenya (1999-2004) and within a programme for the expansion of FFS to eastern and southern Africa (2005-2008), funded by IFAD. He has been enormously active in managing and promoting processes that have led to the continual enhancement of FFS methods and their adaptation to different sub-sectors (fisheries, forestry, livestock etc) through training of trainers, conferences and publications. Outside of Kenya, he has been very active in introducing and improving FFS-based approaches to farmer empowerment in Burundi, DR Congo, Ethiopia, India, Lesotho, Mozambique, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Swaziland, Tanzania and Uganda.

To take the FFS movement a step further, particularly in Kenya but also beyond, Godrick has recently taken the initiative to establish a Private FFS Support Organisation in Kenya - FFS Promotion Services - together with other Kenyan Master Trainers and in close collaboration with the FFS Foundation.

Godrick would be the first to admit that the process of extending the FFS network in Africa has been a team effort and that the credit should be shared amongst many. Godrick first sowed the seed, nurtured it, protected it from many attempts to kill it off, and has been indefatigable in contributing to its widespread propagation, serving as an outstanding source of inspiration for many agricultural professionals as well as for many thousands of farmers.

The FFS Foundation wishes Godrick the best of luck in the joint challenge ahead in building further the foundation of a FFS Service Provider - FFS Promotion Services - as a sustainable mechanism to support FFS implementation and expansion in Africa.

Source: FFS Foundation Press Release

About the Farmer Field School Foundation

Established in 2006, the Farmer Field School Foundation aims to facilitate an effective, informative and quality dissemination of the Farmer Field School approach throughout the world by means of networking, information and knowledge exchange, training, advisory and support services, facilitation of involvement in private sector initiatives, quality assurance and research. Contact: Arnoud Braun, arnoud.braun@ffs-foundation.nl, tel. +31 317 451727.