Growth and Poverty Mailing List Archive

["Dick Tinsley" <<address removed>>]

Extension Continued

Also me to continue my discussion on extension.

Another issue with extension is that most extension programs are based on 
having a traceable administrative link to each individual farmers.  Certainly 
this is what is intended by the T&V system in its original or modified forms.  
I think this is historically based on the US when extension was first developed 
and most farmers lived on homesteads somewhat isolated from their neighbors and 
thus required an extension agent to make direct contact.  

This is not the case in most developing countries where farmers live in 
villages with considerable greater informal communication with each other in 
the village settings.  This then lead a question as to how extensive a 
extension program has to be to effectively communicate with villages.  

To effectively maintain administrative links to each smallholder as envisioned 
in the T&V system has really place a burden on developing country resources and 
rarely have they been able to maintain the full compliment of village extension 
workers need to complete the task.  The result has been the programs like most 
developing government programs have "stalled".  More on that later!

The real question of extension is how much can we rely on the informal 
communication within a village to convey messages to most of the farmers, and 
how much has to be physically extended.

Give the conditions as stated in the previous message, I would think most 
messages could be handled by mass media rather then direct contact, and have 
some confidence that the farmers will review and refine them to meet their 
specific conditions.

It is also interesting to see how much information is getting to the farmers 
via informal sources.  That being dealers, neighbors, visitors or returnees 
etc.  My guess is that upward of 90% of information stallholder respond to come 
from informal source despite the massive effort by public sector extension 
programs.  An example would be virtually all the mechanization information 
moves informally. I can also give more specific examples of some varieties 
moving informally.

Smallholder communities are dynamic and always have been,

Enough rambling on this issue for now.

Dick Tinsley