192 Participatory Processes
people or organizations. Considering these factors, programme implementation,
extension strategies and priority agricultural practices need to differ from area to
area.
Another difficulty concerns access to services. Farmers generate knowledge
through experimentation, observation and sharing, but they still need access to
extension services, research organizations and markets to get the most out of their
learning. There are a number of constraints that make these services inaccessible to
farmers. Sometimes these are a matter of psychology. Poor and marginal farmers
often lack confidence to meet ‘professionals’ and ask them questions. Most farmers
are barely literate and rely on somebody else to read for them. Sometimes the con-
straints are geographical. Research centres are often distant from farmers not only
in physical terms, but also in the way they present research materials, subjects and
results. Such limitations need to be tackled and overcome.
While implementation of the rice programme is proceeding very well overall,
there remain many other challenges. Establishing equal working and learning
opportunities for men and women is one such major challenge in Bangladesh.
Another challenge has to do with the way we measure success. Organizations are
under pressure from government or donor agencies to demonstrate quantifiable
outputs. This can impinge upon the quality of the service provided as well as on
the principle of putting farmers at the centre. For example, a programme may have
contractual responsibilities with donors to train a certain number of farmers annu-
ally in order to justify budget allocations. If the number is overestimated, the rush
to reach this number before the end of the year will decrease the quality of the
work and the sustainability of the learning process. The organization needs to
protect the quality of its interventions by avoiding an excessive preoccupation with
target numbers.
Conclusions
The rice programme is still learning from ongoing activities and innovations. It
strives to be an education programme rather than just agricultural extension.
Clearly, it has been quite successful in facilitating a process in which farmers can
get more out of their rice fields. To what degree this is due to their increased capac-
ity in decision making and management is not yet clear. It is clear, however, that it
represents an improvement over the training-lecture types of programmes whose
limitations are well known in terms of their doubtful sustainability, dubious qual-
ity and poor fit with farmers’ needs.
The programme needs to continue to focus on giving farmers opportunities to
take control of their own learning. The social, economic and cultural milieu in
Bangladesh does not easily support this. To start working with poor and marginal
farmers, it has been necessary to adopt specific and beneficial sustainable agricul-
ture entry points that offer a high likelihood of success. But the programme must