Farm and community practice report carried at Norges development organization in Abarilela sub-county Amuria district.

Abstract

Farm and community practice and industrial training is usually done to make students apply most of the skills taught at school or lecture room related to his/her course and gain more experience in the filed or farm and conditions as well as challenges available and how to go about them. The purpose of farm practice and community is to provide students with relevance of the classroom theoretical knowledge to be applied in the field and hence fully become exposed to the community before being passed out from the university to serve or work This report contain the information about the farm practice and community outreach activities that I carried out from Abarilela sub-county Amuria district with Norges Development Organization (NDO) from 28th February to 6th May 2022. I carried out these activities with the formed FFS groups that the organization was working with. The activities include follow up on constitution writing, training farmers on VSLA and its concepts, training farmers on conflict and conflicts resolution, training farmers on leadership in VSLA, training farmers on farming as a business and record keeping and conducted meetings that involved drawing the transect map for the watershed, wealth ranking, drawing the crop calendar, drawing a problem analysis, drawing the objective tree analysis, drawing the watershed plan, mobilizing among others. This training has helped me to gain some Teaching skill because I was able to teach farmers and train them different aspects like FAAB, conflict and conflict resolution, gained confidence in training and speaking to different age group of farmers, communication skill because I was able to pass on information to various groups of farmers saving skill because I was able to attend the saving meetings of different FFS groups in Abarilela sub county, I gained more knowledge on how FFS perform, I gained knowledge on group dynamic since I was able to interact with different FFS groups of Abarilela sub-county, skill of institution for different groups. Although there was enough to learn, there were also some few challenges that I met during this period like Lack of transport to the field sometimes due to limited motor cycles, natural calamities like drought that made activities like land preparation and planting of the seeds to delay, absenteeism of most farmers in FFS groups in Abarilela, late coming of some farmers hence making the trainings to always start late. The organization should continue to train more intern students, the organization should work together with the field facilitators on absenteeism of farmers and late comers so that they can start benefiting from the trainings rendered to them by facilitators.