2018 ASHS Annual Conference

The "Empowering Women Farmers with Agricultural Business Management Training" (EMWOFA) is an EU Erasmus+ funded project to extend empower small-scale women farmers to manage their farms as businesses. It provides a comprehensive educational program to develop technical, entrepreneurial and managerial knowledge of extension educators in agriculture. These trained extension educators will train women farmers who are not likely to have vocational education training about the technical and managerial aspects of managing their farms. However, these women must work on farms. The EMWOFA Project developed educational materials to “Train the Trainers”. These educators will then train women farmers to improve their business skills and farms. This will have a multiplier effect by reaching women farmers in the EU and other countries. A teacher’s workbook or educational program gave the trainers educational material to train women farmers. We designed a workbook to help women farmers develop a business plan for their farms and review best management production methods for growing horticultural crops. Short, e-learning videos summarize the educational program and workbook. The videos are tagged one after another to make it easy for the user to follow. The educational program, workbooks, and e-learning videos are available in four languages: Turkish, English, German, and Spanish. We shared the videos, educational program manuals, and workbooks for women farmers with extension bodies in the EU and posted them on the EMWOFA web portal for free use. We conducted a survey of 13 extension educators from Turkey and Germany who attended the first EMWOFA Train-the-Trainer session in Freising, Germany in October 2016. The average age of the participants was 39 with an average of 9 years of experience as an extension educator. They all had positive impressions about the Educational Program. They felt confident about their knowledge in business management and technical production topics and scored their ability to teach every part of a business management and greenhouse production an average of 4.5 on a 5-point scale. Training materials are on the EMWOFA website: www.emwofa.eu to guarantee both dissemination and the sustainability of the EMWOFA project