John Ogonowski Farmer-to-Farmer Program

The Farmer-to-Farmer Europe, Caucasus, and Central Asia (F2F-ECCA) project funded by USAID seeks to promote sustainable economic growth, food security, and agricultural development worldwide by utilizing U.S. volunteers to provide technical assistance to farmers, farm groups, agribusinesses, and other agriculture sector institutions in developing and transitional countries.
F2F-ECCA will drive sustainable, broad-based economic growth in the agricultural sector through increased agricultural sector productivity and profitability, and will strengthen agricultural sectors in Armenia, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan.

Project Objectives

The ECCA strategy will focus on Rural Enterprise Development with goals to:

Increase agricultural sector productivity and profitability;
Increase climate-smart agriculture, production, and processing practices;
Increase access to diverse and profitable international markets;
Strengthen agricultural extension and training;
Promote gender equity and youth engagement;
Generate employment;
Expand sector access to financial services; and
Strengthen international trade linkages and markets beyond Russia.

Project Activities

Farmer-to-Farmer’s decades of experience in the ECCA region have enabled us to establish in-depth and trusted local networks and relationships with agribusinesses, local organizations such as VISTAA, and other critical market systems actors there, resulting in committed hosts and well-defined assignments with inclusive, systemic changes and results.

During the next five years of F2F, we will:

Build on our track record of recruiting and fielding diverse volunteers to engage more women and youth as hosts and local volunteers for remote/paired assignments.
Use our Service Learning Corps (SLC) and our partner, NPCA, to advance recruitment of diverse volunteers and tap new recruitment resources from educational institutions that serve historically underrepresented groups. The SLC presents an opportunity to link with younger volunteers through our university network.
Strengthen linkages to educational institutions through long-term SLC student volunteers, and the expertise of university staff and extension agents.