Written by Mekong Institute

This Training of Trainers (TOT) program aims to enhance the capacity of MI partners in pilot provincial sites to become effective capacity development providers and trainers to target local stakeholders, particularly farmers, SMEs, local economic development government officials and agribusiness development service providers. This TOT enables the participants: (i) To localize and deliver this specific training course to target local stakeholders so that jointly they can plan, implement, monitor and evaluate the performance of farmer groups/organizations; and (ii) To acquire knowledge, skills and attitudes to become effective in their changing roles as facilitators, coordinators and service providers in the pilot project sites.  

The training was conducted from 8 March to 14 March by Dr. Le Thi Hoa Sen, Senior Researcher and lecturer at the Faculty of Extension and Rural Development (FERD) and Msc. Nguyen Thien Tam, lecturer and Head of the Department of Rural Economy, FERD, Hue University, Vietnam. They both have extensive experience in conducting TOT and working with farmer organizations. Participants were key informants who were considered as resource people at the provincial, district and commune level to enable the strengthening of farmer organizations at the project target area.

The training course was designed with 5 modules:

1. Module 1: Understanding the TOT ProgramModule
2. Marketing planning for agricultural productsModule
3. Farmers’ awareness on market, market access, farming contract negotiation, production cost analysis, and estimating product’s priceModule
4. Group operation/management and sustaining farmer organizationsModule
5. Planning, monitoring, and evaluation of group operation

A half day field trip was conducted by visiting Huong Do farmer organization in Huong Phung commune, one of the most successful farmer organizations established by MI. The training was successfully organized. Although it lasted 7 days, all 18 participants attended from beginning to the end. They actively participated and contributed significantly to the training. The training evaluation demonstrated that all participants were happy with the training contents with approximately 56% of them indicating that the training contents were useful for their work, 37.5% indicated that they felt confident to apply what they learnt from the training into practice and 44% said they were able to apply the contents of the training into practice.