FIPS: women at heart of 1M interventions
22 October 2010

Support from RIU has resulted in a rapid increase in the number of village-based advisors - who are the backbone of the FIPS field force: from 45 at the start of 2010 to 189 today. Between July 2009 and July 2010 FIPS advisors undertook nearly one million interventions - and women figured prominently in both the delivery and the customer-base.

Because RIU is a research programme it was keen to probe the FIPS model further. Additional support was therefore provided to enable data to be collected and analysed to answer questions such as: what impact is FIPS having and on what scale; how viable are the village-based advisors as small-scale entrepreneurs; and does the FIPS approach engage effectively with women and young people?

This information will be invaluable to FIPS as it refines its business model and will provide it with the evidence it needs to attract new investment from development and commercial partners. RIU support has enabled FIPS to recruit a business development expert and to hire local university students to collect data during their holidays.

The first results have just become available and they provide some interesting insights on the village-based advisors. The data for 144 advisors shows 54 of these (38%) are women and preliminary data from three districts shows that more than half of the advisors are in their twenties.

David Priest from FIPS explained:

"We were pleased to see that nearly 40% of our advisors are women. We leave it up to our district coordinators, who each supervise up to 25 advisors, to decide who to recruit. This tends to involve them choosing people they observe to be particularly enthusiastic to learn more or who have been strongly recommended by their communities.

Where we have women coordinators, they tend to have more women in their teams. But two of male coordinators have teams that are made up of more than half women. Eventually we hope that around half all our advisors will be women. Over time we have seen the proportion tends to increase as the coordinators see the benefits of having more women in their teams.

Our customer base is also strongly represented by women. Over 58% of FIPS customers or participants are women. So it seems, regardless of the gender of our staff, they are very good at finding women customers."

VBA = village-based advisors

Josephine Muthoni, responsible for reporting, monitoring and evaluation at FIPS, has reported gender breakdown figures for customer services provided by FIPS 'field force.'

Jospehine Muthoni said:

"Over the 12 months from July 2009 to July 2010, FIPS-Africa's Kenyan operation: laid 117,497 demonstration plots; disseminated 321,818 small packets of over 33 varieties of improved seed for farmer experimentation; established 8568 multiplication sites for cassava and 13,988 multiplication sites for sweet potato; sold 385,467 vines and cuttings of 19 improved varieties of sweet potato or cassava (with 10 to 100 going to most farmers); vaccinated 106,341 birds against Newcastle disease belonging to 15,209 farmers; held 861 field days with 52,628 registered participants. Only half this period included the scaling up funded by RIU - so next year the figures will be even stronger."

FIPS: summary of activities from July 2009 to July 2010

959,720 interventions