Overview of the FPO ecosystem in India

Farmer Producer Organizations (FPOs) has been largely agreed upon as very instrumental and effective in addressing many constraints of small & marginal farmers. As of now, India has over 10,000 FPOs registered across the country. Over three-fourth of the existing FPOs have been registered only in the last 4-5 years. The distribution of FPOs indicates that over 60 percent FPOs are from the states of Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Karnataka

The Government of India in February 2020 approved and launched the Central Sector Scheme of “Formation and Promotion of 10,000 Farmer Producer Organizations (FPOs)” to form and promote 10,000 new FPOs till 2027-28. Thus, FPOs promotion has emerged as a major programme area for farmers development

Governance of FPOs

Good governance brings high effectiveness for FPOs and is the role of their Board of Directors (BoD) members. BoD members, being farmers themselves, need to be capacitated so that they can govern their FPOs effectively. Being leadership of FPO, their capacity building go long way in effective functioning and sustainability of FPOs. Even if some trainings are being imparted to the BoD members, they are mostly temporary in nature with hardly any standard communication material developed in local language

Capacity building of BoD members

By taking only existing FPOs, at the rate of 10 BoD members per each FPO, there are 1,00,000 BoD members to be trained! Also, as a matter of good governance practice, each year one-third of the BoD members withdraw and new persons come in their place. That means every year, 33,000 new BoD members keep on adding for capacity building! So as to effective, it is estimated that BoD members need training for 20 days over a period of one year

So, the challenge is reaching out to so many BoD members and this calls for development of Trainers, who in turn can reach out to BoD members by trainings. Thus, development of an army of Trainers go long way in contributing to capacity building of BoD members

Training of Trainers (ToT) programs

In the above backdrop, APMAS with support from DGRV, Germany has been conducting a series of Training of Trainers (ToT) Certification Programs at the National, State, and Regional levels on:

1. a) Governance and Management of Farmer Producer Organisations, and
2. b) Marketing and Value Addition by Farmer Producer Organisations
3. c) Financial Accounting

This is to identify different already Trainer level persons in FPO domain and train them so that they become better Trainers for training of BoD members of FPOs. The goal is to develop a pool of qualified trainers who can reach out to meet the capability needs of the FPO Board of Directors (BoD) in different geographies and contexts

Through the pool of trainers there is an utmost requirement of decentralized regional training programs focused on strengthening the institutional and business development aspects of the FPO. Like the human resource pool developed during the SHG movement, in the FPO movement a similar initiative is needed to be delivered with the collaboration of all sorts of stakeholders

Design of ToT Programs

It is proposed to conduct the ToT programs at two levels

1. 1) National ToT programs with senior Trainers from across the states in partnership with APMAS

At least 5 programs have to be conducted for covering participants from different regions – North, South, East, West and North-East

2. 2) State level ToT programs – at state level for each state in partnership with APMAS and local partners

Each program will be conducted in two spells with 6 days each spell i.e. a total of 12 days. The first spell of 6 days deal with Governance and Management of FPOs by using the self-learning modules of 1-6. The second spell of 6 days deal with Business and Services of FPOs by using the self-learning modules of 7-12

BoD Self-learning Modules

This program will be taken up by using as series of 12 Self-learning Modules and 30 Posters developed by FPO Incubation Centre of APMAS. This module serves the purpose of self-learning resource material for BoD members. However, given some exercises/ assignments the module, the BoD members can take up this in their group in facilitation by a resource person. In addition, a Trainers Manual is also developed for use by the participants in training of BoD members

Click here to register & download the modules

Approach and Methodology

As this is going to be training of community members i.e., BoD of FPOs, it is required that these trainings have to be done with participatory methodologies by adhering to adult learning principles. Thus, the focus of ToT programmes is more on methodology and process. That is why there are many participant demo sessions as they have to actually do the sessions with BoD members by following due process and methodology. Content focus is less in the design in view that it is already available in the modules and they are mostly self-explanatory

Overview of the ToT programs

From December 2020 to December 2021, APMAS in collaboration with various partners has conducted 07 ToT batches on Governance and Management, and 03 batches on Marketing and Value Addition. With this, a pool of 215 qualified trainers (from different FPO promoting organizations) has been certified who are carrying out similar capacity-building programs in their working areas. A snapshot of this program is given below:

Sl. No.	Program Name	Location	Dates
1	National Level ToT on Governance & Management of FPOs	APMAS Training Centre, Hyderabad	30th Nov - 05th Dec 2020
2	National Level ToT on Governance & Management of FPOs	APMAS Training Centre, Hyderabad	01st Feb - 06th Feb 2021
3	State Level ToT on Governance & Management of FPOs (partnered with CYSD)	CYSD Training Centre, Bhubaneswar	15th Mar - 20th Mar 21
4	State Level ToT on Governance & Management of FPOs	APMAS Training Centre, Hyderabad	02nd Aug-06th Aug 21
5	National Level ToT on Marketing & Value Addition by FPOs	APMAS Training Centre, Hyderabad	30th Aug - 03rd Sep 21
6	National Level ToT on Governance & Management of FPOs	Patna, Bihar	18th Oct - 22nd Oct 21
7	National Level ToT on Marketing & Value Addition by FPOs	APMAS Training Centre, Hyderabad	25th Oct - 30th Oct 21
8	National Level ToT on Marketing & Value Addition by FPOs	Patna, Bihar	22nd Nov - 26th Nov 21
9	State Level ToT on Governance & Management of FPOs (partnered with PRADAN)	Kurud, Chhattisgarh	06th Dec - 10th Dec 21
10	National Level ToT on Governance & Management of FPOs (partnered with SeSTA)	Guwahati, Assam	06th Dec - 10th Dec 21

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