Serving Farmers and Extension Workers with Digital Information

Digital extension systems need not displace the work of traditional, in-person farmer education. There are many instances in which digital tools and platforms can enrich the range and applicability of information available to extension workers, and magnify their impact.

Many countries continue to invest significant resources in traditional extension systems to facilitate access to information and promote behavior change on the part of farmers in the service of improved agricultural productivity. At a global level, it is estimated that there are more than one million extension workers working across myriad private and public extension systems. The relationships, knowledge and expertise these workers carry with them remain very valuable. However, the systems in which they operate confront many challenges: in-person information sharing is expensive relative to its effects, contact with farmers is irregular, and advice is difficult to customize and deliver on time.

While digital tools and information can not address many of the core challenges confronting traditional extension systems relating to their cost and scalability, they can empower extension workers to be better conduits of up-to-date, customized and timely information. In contexts where literacy and digital literacy is more limited, an extension worker equipped with a mobile phone that is connected to a digital extension system can be far more useful to a farmer than an offline extensionist.

Ethiopia

The video below documents an interview between PAD's Managing Director and Co-Founder, Heiner Baumann, and Yenenesh Egu, Director of Agricultural Extension in the Ethiopian Ministry of Agriculture. As a young women, Mrs. Egu worked as a government extension worker and testifies to the exhausting conditions that extensionists encounter in the field. In conversation with Heiner she highlights a range of advantages digital extension offer to both farmers and extension workers, and the importance of digital as a complement to enhance the reach and effectiveness of traditional extension work.

Odisha, India

In India the public extension service is staffed by Agricultural Officers (AO’s) who oversee Village Agricultural Workers (VAW’s), who in turn supervise Krushak Sathi (KS’s) or Farmer Friends. KS's are volunteer, village-based extension workers.

In Odisha, PAD works with our government partner, the Department of Agriculture and Farmer Empowerment (DAFE), to deliver the Ama Krushi service to over 700,000 farmers. In addition to our service to farmers, we are working with DAFE to enroll extension workers onto the Integrated Voice Response (IVR) service and train them to understand the full capabilities of the service.

In 2019, 1,600 VAWs and 4,000 KSs were registered on the Ama Krushi service and have been trained to complement and implement actions recommended by the IVR service across 25 of Odisha's 30 districts. These extension workers receive weekly messages (customized advisory and pest alerts), and are able to access all Q&A functionalities on the service.

In addition to the communications channels offered through Ama Krushi, PAD also engages with VAWs and KS more directly using WhatsApp and scheduled government video conferences. We also conduct conduct capacity building activities to maximize understanding of the service and its capabilities. In addition to acting as a resource for extension workers as they carry out their duties, we encourage these extensionists to promote awareness of PAD’s services among the farmers they work with. In the coming year, PAD will experiment with an online tool that extension workers can use to enroll farmers directly onto our services using their smartphones.

Rwanda

The government of Rwanda, in collaboration with One Acre Fund (OAF), a leading non-profit active among smallholders in East Africa, run annual campaigns aimed at encouraging smallholders to adopt improved agricultural inputs. In 2019 the campaign focussed on the adoption of hybrid maize on the part of smallholder farmers. Hybrid varieties of maize are higher yielding than non-hybrid farmer-owned varieties, and their adoption has trailed the government’s targets.

The government of Rwanda maintains an extensive network of extension agents. “Farmer Promoters” (FPs) are elected model farmers who serve as volunteer extension agents at the village level. They are responsible for promoting learning amongst their peer farmers.

In this setting, PAD and OAF sent messages to FPs nudging them to encourage farmers to adopt hybrid maize. The messages highlighted the benefits of hybrid maize, the reasons farmers typically do not adopt hybrid maize and promoted information to address common concerns about the adoption of hybrid maize.

The primary question we asked is in designing this campaign is: Can a mobile-advisory service offered to volunteer extension workers improve farmer adoption of high-yielding maize varieties? Data collection to evaluate the impact of this campaign is ongoing.

In 2018, the evaluation of a similar campaign established that messages to FPs can increase the reach of national campaigns by a factor of five to seven percentage points, depending on model specifications.

In the upcoming season, OAF will, in a subset of the districts, expand the campaign to include the distribution of hybrid maize tester packs, which will be targeted to farmers who historically have chosen not to adopt hybrid maize varietals. PAD is working alongside OAF to understand how best to incorporate mobile technology into this campaign, to maximize farmer learning and maximize the potential impact on farmer incomes.