Sustainable Agriculture & Rural livelihoods
AF at present focuses on transforming the conventional HEIDA (High External Input Destructive Agriculture), to sustainable that is low cost, local resource based, eco-regenerative and small rainfed farmer oriented. In pursuance of Sustainable Agriculture AF organizes farmers groups with rainfed and drought affected farmers into “Sasyamitra Grops” (SMGs). And through them promotes farming systems integrating diversified annual crops, tree crops and animals. AF intensively campaigns against use of chemicals in agriculture and promotes Non-Pesticidal Management (NPM) and various kinds of bio-fertilizers such as vermin composting, farm composting, liquid fertilizers, mulching etc. AF promotes crop diversity and crop rotation with the objective of household food and nutritional security on one side and soil health environment and bio-diversity on the other hand. Perennial tree crops for fruit, fodder and biomass as tree crops are more drought tolerant than annual crops and benefit rainfed farmers as an insurance against droughts. AF organizes campaigns on policy issues related to gender, environment, agriculture at village, mandal and district levels.
Accessing Basic Services
AF facilitates and enables the rural poor to access basic services like PDS, health care, education, social security and particularly the Rural Employment Guarantee Program. AF educates the labor on their rights under MGNREGP and also advocates that it should be used to create long term durable productive land based assets like rainfed tree crops for the very labour under the program.
Alternate Livelihoods for Rural Youth and Women
AF runs two Driving Schools with a capacity to train about 250 rural youth per year. And two other Skills Training Centres are run with the capacity to train about 1000 rural youth per year. The rural under-educated youth, (girls & boys) are trained in job oriented skills Driving, ITES, Hospitality, Customer Care, Automobiles, Electrical Wiring, etc. AF is enabling access to rural youth for various other vocational training organised by Government Agencies like RUDSETI, JSS, DRDA etc.
AF is now reviewing youth and its alternate livelihoods program in view of global recession and fall of job market.
Alliance Building and Policy Advocacy
AF is actively campaigning and building Public Opinion on policy issues of Poverty, Environment, Agriculture, Gender etc. It is involved in alliance building & informal networking with other NGOs, CSOs and CBOs on issues of Gender, Poverty, Environment and Agriculture and lobbying with Government for pro-poor policies and removal of various bottlenecks in implementation of various anti poverty programme.