Training to improve
Rwandan farmers’ income

Agriculture has long served as the backbone of the Rwandan economy. According to the National Institute of Statistics Rwanda (NISR), the sector employs 66 per cent of Rwandans and accounts for 26 per cent of GDP as of 2021. However, smallholder farmers still produce the majority of Rwanda’s agricultural output, which is largely at the level of unproductive subsistence farming, accounting for about 75 per cent of total agricultural production.

Several factors contribute to the predominance of subsistence agriculture, these include small farming plots as a result of limited land, limited use of modern inputs, and reliance on rain-fed production. Many farmers lack education, as 92 per cent of farmers have either no formal education or only completed primary education. The resulting lack of knowledge and skills also limits their ability to leverage market opportunities. They lack information on crop prices and favourable agro-inputs like fertilizers, as well as necessary funds to invest in post-harvest infrastructures. As a result, the prices earned by farmers are low. Further, due to the high perceived financial risk of smallholder farmers, access to formal financial services is hampered, which limits their ability to invest in the expansion and improvement of their agricultural activities.

Consequently, smallholder subsistence farmers’ agricultural productivity, and thus income as well as nutrition are adversely affected – since most of their produce is needed to feed their own families. 

In 2022, Invest for Jobs partnered with nine farmer cooperatives involved in garlic production in Rwanda’s Northern and Southern provinces to support them in training their members. Garlic is one of the cash crops grown in Rwanda, making it an excellent base for increasing the productivity and profitability of farmers. The aim of the project was to increase the entrepreneurship and business skills of more than 3,800 smallholder farmers, contributing to increased income generation in their regions.

The approach applied in the joint project was developed for cocoa production systems in Ghana, Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroun, and Togo, where it became known as the Farmer Business School (FBS). Since its initiation, it has been applied to train over 1,400,000 smallholder farmers in 22 African countries. Now, with the support of Invest for Jobs, it has reached Rwanda.

The FBS focuses on improving farmers’ business skills. Training modules include topics such as farm management, financial acumen, and product diversification. Ultimately, the modules help farmers in taking income-oriented decisions based on cost-benefit analyses that consider different technologies for a lead crop and two other food crops. Thus, they receive the needed tools to identify market opportunities to improve productivity, family income, and nutrition.

The trainings are intended to contribute to achieving the following objectives: 

• Productivity and quality increases of smallholder agriculture;
• Diversification of smallholdings;
• Improved incomes and living conditions of smallholders and their families;
• Professionalising producers and their organisations;
• Practicing climate-smart agriculture

The farmers are being trained in cohorts of 25-30 farmers. Each cohort is trained on five subsequent days. Trainings take place within the farming communities in very diverse locations, such as communal houses, churches, warehouses, or simply under a tree close to clay walls for visualising posters.

Based on an economic analysis of the Rwandan context, the FBS training contents of other countries were carefully adapted. For Rwandan farmers, they focussed on three locally relevant value-chains: beside garlic, the training modules targeted the potato and maize value chains, encouraging farmers to diversify their production.

As a first step, 15 Rwandese trainers completed a Training-of-Trainers (ToT) with the newly tailored training materials. The ToT consisted of two weeks of in-classroom training and subsequent practical training of farmers within predefined learning groups. This way, trainers quickly gained hands-on experience and received input on their teaching.

From July to December 2022, the 15 trainers trained 3,875 smallholder farmers in Rwanda, including 2,092 women. As part of the training programmes, trainers also conducted post-training follow-up sessions with the farmers to assess whether they are implementing the skills they have acquired.

As a result of the trainings, all farmers adopted new farming technologies and diversified their crops. 89 per cent of the farmers were thus able to increase their incomes. In addition, they improved their overall farm management and agricultural practices. For instance, 93 per cent of the farmers enhanced their financial management and record-keeping skills and 74 per cent improved their collaboration with buyers, input suppliers as well as other farmers.

The Farmer Business School (FBS) project in Rwanda was implemented by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH in the context of Invest for Jobs on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and in partnership with the Agri-business Facility for Africa (ABF). ABF was commissioned by BMZ to support partner institutions to rollout FBS in other regions and value chains.