Growth and Poverty Mailing List Archive

["Alastair Bradstock" <<address removed>>]

I would like to comment on a different type of 'stalled' extension service.

The Department of Agriculture in South Africa's Northern Cape province finds 
itself in an enviable but rather peculiar position compared to many other SSA 
countries. The department is relatively rich and indeed during my four years in 
the province it only ever managed to spend about 60 per cent of its annual 
budget. In spite of these resources, it was unable to provide any sort of 
effective technical agricultural and organisational support to groups that had 
benefited from the government's land reform programme. 

The key problem was that the department had not developed a methodology that 
structured the way in which it delivered its wide range of technical services. 
Thus the little support that extension officers gave was ad hoc, reactive and 
largely ineffective. Thus the extension service was also 'stalled'. The NGO 
FARM-Africa has been working with departmental staff to develop such a 
methodology.

If extension services in other countries are successful in securing long-term 
sustainable funding what are chance that they will experience the South African 
syndrome and still be unable to deliver an effective service for farmers. If 
this is the case might DFID funds be well spent on supporting the development 
of methodologies that help provide a more structured way of delivering 
extension inputs?

Alastair Bradstock

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