by Ram Bill G. Bautista, RPCO3 InfoACE

The Department of Agriculture – Philippine Rural Development Project (DA-PRDP), in partnership with the Jollibee Group Foundation (JGF), conducted the Agro-Enterprise Clustering Approach (AECA) Facilitators’ Skills Training on November 4-8 in Baguio City.

The facilitator’s training is one of the key supporting activities with the DA – Farmers and Fisheries Consolidation and Clustering (F2C2) program to capacitate the facilitators in assisting the Farmer Cooperatives and Associations (FCA) and FCA clusters to implement the AECA in their livelihoods through collective marketing and leverage in the economies of scale.

The JGF and their partner training team, Up Next, focused on the development of teaching and facilitation abilities, equipping participants to effectively communicate the elements and advantages of AECA, engage the farmers, and manage group dynamics. These skills are critical to strengthen the AECA implementation which aims to upscale the benefits that will be experienced by the farmers through the PRDP’s interventions. 

The said training’s participants included staff from the PRDP I-REAP Component and the F2C2 program across the country that has already completed a set of pre-requisites set by the JGF.

Under the PRDP Scale-Up, one of its key strategies involves the integration of clustering approach in proposed subprojects, particularly in its enterprise development component, I-REAP. This strategy entails a cluster of FCAs working together to sell their consolidated crops or products. In return, the involved FCAs would benefit from the decreased average cost of production and marketing by the increased quantity of output.

The AECA is a tool introduced by the JGF which is an eight-step process that teaches smallholder farmers business skills for a more sustainable livelihood. In July 2023, the DA and the JGF signed a Memorandum of Agreement for the institutionalization of the AECA in the department. A number of DA staff underwent AECA Introductory and Intermediate courses that aimed to capacitate them as AECA facilitators.

The I-REAP Component has already started to facilitate the AECA Introductory Course to proponent groups of the pipelined subprojects under the PRDP Scale-Up. This course provides an overview of the AECA and focuses on organizing farmers as a cluster and establishing their enterprise.

The PRDP Scale-Up is an expanded version of the PRDP which is a World Bank supported project since 2014. It is one of the DA’s flagship programs designed to address the gaps in the  commodity value chains by improving the efficiency of the food supply chain.