Social Accountability and Social Change: A Toolkit for Small-scale Farmers

This toolkit provides a structured programme of activities and worksheets designed to be used by facilitators working in and with small-scale farmers’ associations in central, west, and southern Africa. It was produced to empower organisations with skills, such as budget monitoring and the use of community scorecards, to improve their situations, grow their organisations, and ultimately contribute more effectively to ensuring food security for themselves, their communities, and ultimately to the whole region. The Institute for Democracy in Africa (IDASA) Economic Governance Programme (EGP) produced the toolkit, which was subsequently ratified by the nine partner country organisations that are part of EGP’s Public Expenditure and Smallholder Agriculture Project. The toolkit provides a set of workshop outlines designed to help farmers’ associations to focus on and find ways to address some of the immediate problems farmers face, as well as some of the structural issues that tend to keep small-scale farmers on the periphery of government and civil society’s attention. The session guidelines include discussion topics, group work, role-plays, and individual exercises, as participants are guided through a process of analysis and action planning. The toolkit also provides background information to assist facilitators in planning the programme.

The toolkit includes of the following sessions:

• Session 1A: Meeting the people and the programme
• Session 1B: Understanding social accountability
• Session 2A: Introducing expenditure monitoring
• Session 2B: Analysing and monitoring budgets
• Session 3A: Introducing community scorecards
• Session 3B: Compiling community scorecards
• Session 4: Building alliances, taking action