Advocacy Sweetens Deal for Kenya’s Rural Sugar Cane Farmers
Photo: pixabay.com
The journey there began six years’ earlier, when SUCAM first brought together groups of local farmers and other stakeholders to form Budget Action Groups.
A grassroots advocacy group has worked with Kenya’s rural sugar cane growers to push for reforms to the country’s Value-Added Tax Act, shaving some 16 percent off farmers’ transport costs.
In June, Kisumu-based Sugar Campaign for Change (SUCAM) presented the farmers’ concerns before the parliament’s Finance and National Planning Committee. Their journey there began six years’ earlier, when SUCAM first brought together groups of local farmers and other stakeholders to form Budget Action Groups, or BAGs.
Since 2015, SUCAM has helped establish BAGs in 15 counties across Western Kenya, expanding their reach to include stakeholders in the aquaculture and poultry sectors. The groups of up to 30 farmers, 50 percent of whom, on average, are youths under the age of 35, used structured dialogue to arrive at a common agenda to advocate for greater government transparency and accountability — twin aims of a 2010 constitutional “dispensation” that decentralized the country’s planning and budgeting processes.
That move was part of an ambitious goal, anchored in the Comprehensive African Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), to eradicate hunger by 2025. Among Policy LINK’s key activities is to provide CAADP “backbone” support for the African Union, which drives the agricultural initiative.