GAWU pushes for inclusion at policy making level

The General Agricultural Workers Union (GAWU) has reiterated the need to include targeted beneficiaries of agricultural programmes at the development and implementation stages of such programmes.

The union stated that it was wrong  for policy makers to make and implement policies without consulting targeted beneficiaries.

The General Secretary of GAWU, Mr Edward Kareweh, said such actions did not help to realise the desired impact of policies and had often resulted in the decrease in food production and increased cost of food prices, therefore, it was important to include targeted beneficiaries at any attempt to draw a policy of any kind.

“There may be some level of consultation but it is better to involve those who are going to benefit from the policy development and even if they have not been part of it, when it comes to implementation there are also implementation stakeholders who may be different from those who actually made the policy,” he said.

According to him, such stakeholder implementers must then have to understand the psychology, rationale and the objective behind the entire policy to appreciate it and the roles that each of them has to play.

However, he said policy-makers appeared impatient during the implementation to either get all stakeholders on board or tolerate their views.

Challenges to look at
Mr Kareweh said the agricultural sector was huge and diverse by its features, such that its challenges were not uniformed and so needed to be broken down to the sub-sectors to see the core challenges of each sector and address it.

 “The policies we are hearing are the broad policies of the sector but each sub-sector and the details in it aren’t coming out clearly. It appears although that you provide the challenges and the solutions which are broad but when it comes to the details and the implementation then it  is because probably no serious account was taken in respect to the detail and implementation” he said.

He cited that one of the major weaknesses of the country’s development exercise had to do with implementation at two levels; implementation to the letter and implementation to the specification of what was stated it will be done.

Implementation, he said involves broader stakeholders than just the policy development.

“So you find the policy makers they make the policy but when it comes to the implementation they are not the people who are either going to do it or they are not going to do it alone and it involves a number of stakeholders who have not been brought on board to understand the policy and then to make their necessary contribution to the implementation process. So implementation then eventually arrives at a shortfall,” he said.

‘One district., One factory’
He said that although the concept was good there were unanswered questions about the size because it should be able to take what is produced in the districts to make a lot of impact.

“Probably the concept is to address the perennial complaint that farmers produce and there is no market and the produce get rotten, so if you have a factory which is just close to you the overall effect is that once the factory takes all your produce then the  post-harvest loses would be reduced,” he said.