Written by CFU COLLABORATES WITH PARTNER ORGANISATIONS TO PROVIDE FINANCIAL LITERACY TRAINING TO FARMERS
Since late 2018 the CFU has been collaborating with several partner organizations to bring financial literacy training and farming as a business to farmers in its operational areas. It has collaborated in this with GIZ; with the bilaterally funded Zambian-German Agricultural Knowledge Training Centre (AKTC); with Germany’s SBFIC; and with FSDZ (Financial Sector Deepening Zambia).
These organizations have brought their well-honed financial training skills to the CFU’s cohort of Field Officers and Lead Farmers (Farmer Coordinators or FC’s), with the intention of intensely improving the skills of specific individuals identified, or the aim to provide wide scale access to financial literacy training.
The approach of the different partnerships have explored subtly different pathways, and different geographical areas. The partnership with AKTC has so far seen 76 women farmers (often CFU Lead farmers, but not exclusively) who have already exhibited entrepreneurial direction being invited to a 2 day residential training on finance and business skills at AKTC’s training Centre in Chisamba. The collaboration with FSDZ has seen 3,776 CF linked farmers receive financial literacy advice and training through a mobile phone platform, and the MOU’s with SBFIC and GIZ have seen approximately half (so far) of the CFU’s Field Officers receive intensive Trainer-of-Trainer sensitization in residential training sessions that have lasted as long as 4 days. These training sessions have used clever simulation models or more traditional training methods to try and strengthen the capacity of rural farmers to manage their personal and farm business finances and access to financial services. Not all of the CFU’s Field officers have yet been trained, but the follow-down training in the communities served by those who have been trained has already commenced. In Southern Region 1,200 farmers have been trained on the SBFIC role play simulation model, and in the Western Region the 21 Field Officers are training an average of 75 farmer’s apiece
