Fair Trade Africa (FTA), a member of the International Fair Trade movement, has been representing Fair Trade certified producers (over 1 050 000) in Africa (across 33 countries) and the Middle East since its establishment in 2005. Based in Nairobi, Kenya, the organization also works via other offices in Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Malawi and South Africa. In addition to these offices, FTA also works with a committee, consisting of farmers or workers, responsible for the management of Fairtrade Premium in accordance with Fairtrade standards. Finally, a Fairtrade Officer is involved in the coordination of Fairtrade matters, acting as the liaison between his or her organization and FTA.
Its objective is threefold. First, FTA supports established organizations (more than 600) subject to their ability to engage in commercial activities and their potential to sell their products as Fair Trade. Members of those organizations must be small-scale producers and smallholders, i.e. running their own farm with their family’s labor. Secondly, the organization provides assistance, be it onsite or remote, as well as support services (such as trainings and peer to peer exchanges). This assistance targets all levels of the organization (workers, technical staff, producers, etc.) with the overarching aim of strengthening both the organizational governance and their professionalism. Third, FTA supports the certified organizations financially, mainly via local or international donors through projects launched with specific thematic in mind (e.g. climate change adaptation, youth, gender, workers’ rights, etc.).
One of the main FTA’s projects is its Online Academy, which is evolving together with the needs and desires of FTA staff and the different organizations. Its primary function is to provide efficient, learner-friendly study methods (through modules, gamification, quizzes, tests, etc.) so as to develop intellectual, conceptual and consulting capacities of the staff, for them to later pass on quality education, training, consultancies and information to all members. Ultimately, the main goal is to strengthen producer organizations to be more inclusive, resilient, independent and sustainable organizations.
With the support of the Trade for Development Centre, the project was launched and tested. First, with 125 FTA staff members, the pilot version was tested to optimize the usability of the application, which resulted in tremendous improvements as well as in the harmonization of all the training material. Also, with the help of a training consultant, the project was assessed in two ways: (1) test its compliance with the members’ needs, more particularly regarding the level and quality of delivery in mind and (2) test its robustness, effectiveness and consistency. As a result, the FTA was able to enhance the impact of its training with a robust Staff Capacity Development, an evaluation strategy as well as the development of a successful electronic learning application and platform.
This French and English e-learning application has both offline and online capacities, and runs with Android and IOS, which was the first objective of the project. It contains 21 training manuals and programs and is linked to the Fairtrade International and FTA homepages of Fairtrade producer library, and now includes all 127 staff (second objective). The latter all completed an online knowledge test on Fairtrade standard (third objective) and indicated an improvement in their knowledge and skills through the platform (fourth objective, which is still undergoing). Finally, this project reflects important FTA’s themes, including women and gender issues, child labor, child protection, environmental and social issues. The Online Academy keeps improving thanks to a feedback system (through questionnaire at the end of each module) and to its results closely monitored by the Project Manager and the beneficiaries. At this stage, a key improvement of the system would be its ability to translate manually uploaded content in either French or English, on top of its current ability to translate built-in information.
Amount of subsidies: 19,500 euros over two years, in 2021 and 2022.
