Farmer Field and Business School: Toolkit

The Farmer Field and Business School (FFBS), an approach originally developed under CARE’s Pathways to Empowerment program, focuses on improving rural, small-scale women farmers’ productivity and profitability by empowering women to more fully engage in equitable agriculture systems, using an integrated, gender-transformative, market-based and nutrition sensitive extension approach. The Scaling Up FFBS Globally program, funded by the Sall Family Foundation, now influences over twenty global programs spanning over 30 countries, and aims to reach 25 million producers by 2027.

The FFBS toolkit is not intended to be applied sequentially, cover-to-cover. It is organized by the key technical components (facilitation, collectives, gender, sustainable agriculture, marketing, nutrition, monitoring, evaluation and learning, and System Strengthening and Social Accountability through Community Score Card and Advocacy), all of which should be addressed in a given agriculture cycle. However, these tools represent a menu of options. Facilitators should choose tools for each part of the season that best complement each other and are most relevant for each community’s needs.