| Success Case Replication
Success Case Replication (SCR) is simple. It has two main steps:
- A. Locate farmers, or groups, who have achieved good success in their enterprises,
- Mobilize the successful farmer or groups to train their less well off fellow villagers.
It differs from conventional enterprise training because it mobilizes successful farmers, or groups, to train rural poor. It does not depend upon professional or government trainers to conduct this training.
The methodology follows nine distinct
steps:
- Locate success cases
- Assess replicability (profit and marketability)
- Assess farmer's willingness to become a trainer
- Establish practical, hands on training programme
- Carefully select trainees
- Supervise the training
- Arrange follow-up support services for trainees
- Achieve secondary multiplications after first level successes
- Monitoring cost effectiveness of the methodology.
Intensive field trials of the methodology were conducted from 1994 to 1998 in eight countries:
Bhutan, Lao People's Democratic Republic, Mongolia, Nepal, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Viet Nam. Eighteen agencies, including government, NGOs and rural banks, joined the project and 16 completed all activities.
In order to evaluate the project, each implementing agency kept Cost/Benefit records including the costs for the time devoted to the project by their field staff and the costs for the training for the farmers. The benefits were measured as the net income gained by the successful farm families during the first year they marketed their new product. At the end of the four-year field trials, all project evaluations were consolidated to yield the following achievements at the family level:
Achievement of SCR objectives at the family level
to increase rural household income
| Total number of farm families trained using
SCR |
= 3 332 |
| Number successful and average success rate: |
= 2 359 = 71% |
| Average income gain in first year for each family: |
= $ 449 |
| Total increased net income benefits earned by all families: |
= $1 058 067 |
| Total agency cost, including staff time and farmer training: |
= $ 87 271 |
| Overall ratio of costs to benefits (C/B ratio): |
= 1:12 |
| Lowest C/B ratio was achieved in Bhutan: |
= 1:4 |
| Highest C/B ratio was achieved in Sri Lanka: |
= 1:54 |
The total number of trained farmer households varies among implementing agencies from 11 to 385. However, Viet Nam expanded the project to cover four provinces, training 2 605 farm families with an 87 percent success rate. It achieved a Cost/Benefit ratio of 1:18 in this expansion phase, indicating that the methodology has the full potential for large-scale expansion.
Conclusions
SEEN in terms of measurable results for rural poverty alleviation, this project was remarkably successful. It generated an average income gain of $449 per annum for each of 2 359 rural farm households, who now command sustainable enterprises, expected to yield income into the foreseeable future. The methodology has generated, on average, 12 US dollars of net income for each dollar of agency costs. It has proven to be well adapted to local conditions because it uses existing local success cases for replication.
Documents
available for download
1 - Success Case
Replication: a manual for increasing farmer household income (pdf
file:
421 kb; MS Word
file:
260 kb)
2 - Cost-effective employment promotion for the rural poor (pdf
file, 106 kb)
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