Since 2018, Mercy Corps and John Deere have implemented POWER 2.0 (Promoting Organizations that Work to Empower Rice Farmers), a program to support smallholder farmers in Indonesia to increase their productivity and income by strengthening farmer groups’ organizational capacity.
The POWER program focuses on improving Farmer Groups’ business capacity, thereby potentially contributing to increasing farmers’ productivity and income. Moreover, the program also seeks to tackle the issue of the unequal participation of women farmers and the regeneration of young farmers, as these problems haunt Indonesia’s food security in the future. The program is trying to solve these problems by providing equal opportunities to invite women and young farmers back to agriculture-based businesses. The farmer groups that have been fostered by the POWER 2.0 program for three years have shown a very good average business turnover growth of around 21%. From the total of 20,000 rice, corn, and horticulture farmers who have been fostered by the POWER program, 27% of them are farmers aged under 39 years old and 29% of them are women farmers.
In this webinar session, we invite the audience of the sustainable agriculture community throughout Southeast Asia to learn together about the program’s impact to advance the farmer groups’ business capacity and what we have done in the POWER program so that more youth and women farmers can become more productive.
Agenda
- 10:00 – 10:10 Welcome and Introduction
- 10:10 – 10:40 POWER Program Showcase
- 10:40 – 11:25 World Café Roundtables
- Key Success to Strengthening the Capacity of Farmer Organization by Ayu Sara Herlia (POWER Program)
- Youth Entrepreneurship & Digital Technology (Covid-19) by Amelia Gita Tifani (POWER Program)
- Private-Public Partnerships by Tri Ismono (POWER Program Manager)
- 11:25 – 11:30 Recap and Closing