ICTs: transforming agricultural extension?
Don Richardson (2006)
This summary report provides an outline of the main issues and trends in agricultural extension, as they relate to ICTs, with a special emphasis on improving rural livelihoods. The report draws on the presentations, case studies and discussions from the CTA Observatory. It highlights the potential for, and constraints to, using ICTs for agricultural communication and information exchange and identifies implications of these issues for CTA. Some of the issues addressed by the report are:
what are the main constraints to using ICTs to improve rural livelihoods and agricultural communication and information exchange?
what are the main policy issues related to the use of ICTs for agricultural extension?
what ICTs are being used in agricultural extension, and how have they been used in specific agricultural sectors to improve rural livelihoods?
The rural livelihoods approach yields seven most appropriate ICT project themes for
improving rural livelihoods:
Improving universal access telecommunications policies and programmes by empowering rural and agricultural stakeholder organisations so that they can participate in advocacy efforts on behalf of rural people
Rural credit and rural financial services – improvements in access, reach and flexibility
Louder rural and agricultural stakeholder voices yielding improved access to decision-makers to influence policies, regulations and procedures that have a direct impact on rural livelihoods
More informed rural people and farmers who can use information to make relevant decisions about livelihood strategies, thereby reducing disaster impact (flood, disease, drought warning and mitigation), and increasing income diversification
Improvements in efficiency and effectiveness of rural service delivery across areas of health, education, agricultural extension, training and knowledge resources
Improved ICT planning capacities among civil society organisations – to plan, implement and integrate ICTs into their overall services
Application of ICTs in land surveys and registration systems for more efficient recording of land titles, and registration and transfer of land holdings.
More important than the role of specific technologies or applications is the adoption of
best practices in the field of ICTs for development. The following best practices build on
lessons learned from the field of communication for development, and are focused on
ICTs for rural and agricultural development:
Build on existing technical and organisational systems before attempting to create new ones –how can the efficient use of ICTs lubricate or enhance systems that are already working?
Ensure multi-stakeholder governance in project management and monitoring and evaluation – because ICT projects are, by nature, multi-stakeholder projects. If an ICT project is supposed to benefit the rural poor, make sure the beneficiaries have some stake in project governance
Ensure participation of the user community in the design and management of ICT solutions that affect their livelihoods and work processes. If you are introducing ICTs into an agricultural or rural system, remember it is not only the technology that needs to communicate – project planners and implementers need to communicate and engage with user communities
Exploit the full range of existing media, including both old (e.g. rural radio) and new ICTs (e.g. Internet kiosks, PDAs). It is always useful to look at what actually works well, and is financially sustainable, in the developed world context: newspapers, magazines, community meeting halls, coffee shops and telephones are still the ‘killer’ ICT applications for farm families in developed countries such as Canada. There is no reason to expect that rural farm families in Thailand will leapfrog those ICTs for high-tech devices that are not frequently used elsewhere
Recognise that, in the context of ICTs and agriculture, women are twice as likely as men to be involved in agricultural activities, and that women have principal roles in smallholding subsistence farming, agri-business and food processing. This means involving the full community of ICT users, not just the male half of the community of users, in developing and implementing ICT projects.
Five key recommendations were derived from the CTA Observatory:
engage in regional ICT policy awareness-raising workshops for managers and senior professional staff involved in extension services in ACP countries
produce simple fact sheets on the successful use of ICTs in agricultural extension
package multi-stakeholder planning approaches
develop ICT problem trees for better bottleneck analysis
facilitate studies on the current status of the regulatory environment in ACP countries.
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