Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) have become the means for helping poor farmers increase their income. But NGOs in Peru have been reluctant to share their experiences and ideas on best practices because they have been afraid that others will steal their ideas and out-compete them for funding. In addition, many have been hesitant to discuss their projects frankly, because they have been afraid that donors will learn about their weaknesses. Also, the NGOs use different types of projects and methods to help farmers increase income, and some are not sure if there are best practices that are common to their projects.
Last December, representatives of 21 NGOs working in Peru's Southern Sierra overcame their reluctance to help improve each other's projects. They met in Cuzco for two days and discussed the results of their projects, the lessons learned, and the best practices for helping farmers increase income. They concluded that insisting that farmers adopt a "technological package" had not worked, and they discussed methods for analyzing and selecting the farming practices to be changed and/or adopted with the farmers. The representatives of the NGOs discussed the importance of the new market-driven approaches to rural development, and they developed methods for helping farmers assess markets. They also discussed their failure to evaluate their projects, as well as the difficulties of hiring a staff person just to do evaluations, and they devised simple evaluation methods that their field staff can apply.
Karen Kraft, SID's country director for Peru, said the workshop "was an important first step in sharing experiences as well as resolving the common problems of project management among NGOs in the Southern Sierra.” Hernán Mormontony, director of one of the NGOs at the workshop (IDMA), said that he “learned from the variety of valuable development experiences presented at the workshop", and that he “will use the strategies and methods discussed to improve IDMA's projects.”
SID is helping all 21 of the NGOs to improve the impact and coverage of their projects, and the NGOs also evaluated SID's technical assistance and recommend how to improve it. Finally, they agreed to meet each year to continue the process of working together to improve their projects.
