ABSTRACT
Aiming to move farmers from subsistence levels to more prosperous and sustainable livelihoods, the CARP platforms have tested an approach of building community-based agri-enterprises through structured and facilitated multi-disciplinary platforms that has also pulled in a wide range of other stakeholders. Universities have had to reorient how they conduct ‘outreach’ with communities from an extractive to a collaborative approach. The CARP approach positions students and researchers as ‘facilitators of development’ in communities, rather than as experts who come in with ‘solutions’ to communities’ challenges. Paradigms of participatory research and experiential learning have steadily gained ground, while researchers have increasingly recognised the need to meet farmers in their communities to co-develop research designs and agendas that respond to farmers’ particular, context-specific realities, needs and articulated demands. Meanwhile, the students have grown a spirit of community giveback as development facilitators co-creating solutions with farmers and other value chain actors. This chapter illustrates some of the processes of building strong, multi-faceted collaborations with farmer groups to open up new livelihood possibilities and develop small-scale agro-industrialisation.
