THE participatory approach is a tool that allows people to take an active and responsible role. It emerged as a result of general recognition that intervention strategies, which had been advocated in the past, did not work.

Recently, governments have shown more willingness to include people’s participation in rural development policies.

The approach supports activities designed to encourage decentralisation of technical services, end state involvement and privatise production and management activities, including the exploitation of forest and natural resources.

The rise of farmer participatory research (FPR) is an effort of agricultural professionals to combine farmers’ indigenous traditional knowledge (ITK) with the more widely recognised expertise. The approach is an attempt to involve farmers in setting the research agenda, undertaking experiments and analysing findings and results.

The Participatory Action Research (PAR) was initiated to conduct research experiments on the farmers’ field through constant involvement of farmers as the end user and share the findings with the researchers.

The participatory approach when applied to the management of land and natural resources becomes a tool that encourages an entire population to take effective control of land development activities. The approach contributes to socio-economic development planning. It aims at modifying the perception of people’s different roles and proposes that responsibilities be shared among the partners.

There are many NGOs (national/international) working on participatory approaches to increase the livelihood of poor communities. The Agha Khan Rural Support Programme (AKRSP) is one of the successful stories of participatory approaches to improve the productivity of rural communities in the Northern Areas and Chitral. This has resulted from its interventions in productive investments, production-support investments such as access roads, training, and financial and technical services. A key element has been institutional development of the village organizations (VOs) and women’s organizations (WOs). The VOs and WOs are used as participatory methods to carry out desired objectives.

The participatory approach is the driving force, and is based on dialogue between technical institutions and the population and on the concept of partnership. Its main objective is to involve people closely in the design and implementation of all the development activities that affect them.

There are always farmers who have above-average skills, knowledge and talents for different farm enterprises. These farmers can motivate others, help them improve their skills, and share their know-how. These farmers have been trained to be farmer trainers.

With the participatory, local fruit trees that are easy to manage, can be improved for better subsistence production, as the potential market is good for such fruits as apple, date, grape and mango. Learning, grafting and budding techniques being introduced to new, improved varieties that produce results quickly show farmers how much they can gain from growing trees as crops. Farmer trainers are encouraged to establish fruit tree nurseries, and they have been helped to set up mother-tree blocks of improved cultivars for producing scions.

This system leads to a decentralized, demand-driven nursery network that can provide smallholder farmers with quality germplasm. The participatory farm-analysis approach as a tool for identifying the most profitable tree-planting options.

Groups of farmers who share an interest in growing fruit trees help sustain the training impetus and farmer enthusiasm. Small groups acting together can build and form a group that is large enough to command the supply of services that individual farmers in the groups require. This process ultimately results in farmers registering their own business associations, viewed as the cornerstone necessary to lead smallholder farmers out of poverty, contribute to privatizing extension services and making them demand- oriented. It leads to greater production and creative farmer schemes.

The participatory approach is a helpful tool to provide opportunity to all the stakeholders work closely. The success of any project depends on how the real needs/problems of a certain community is addressed by skilled and dedicated project management support.