Science and Technology Mailing List Archive

["Paul Mundy" <<address removed>>]

My name is Paul Mundy. I'm a freelance development communication specialist 
with over 20 years of experience, mainly in Asia and Africa.

I'd like to address the topic of media, which as far as I can see, only Dick 
Tinsley has so far touched on.

There are only two basic ways that farmers can get information about new 
technologies: face-to-face contact (as in training, extension meetings, 
field visits, demonstrations, participatory technology development, farmer 
field schools, etc.), and through some kind of media (radio, TV, printed 
materials, telephone, internet, etc.).

Face-to-face communication is much more effective than mediated 
communication. But it suffers from three major drawbacks:

?       It's very expensive. Just imagine the cost of maintaining armies of 
extension personnel in the field.

?       The audience size is very small. How many farmers can attend a field 
day 
or training course, compared to the potential number of beneficiaries?

?       Information gets eroded. Researchers train extension specialists, who 
train local extension officers, who train field extensionists, who train 
contact farmers, who train other farmers, who train their wives, who 
actually do the work. Informaiton is lost (and added!) at each stage. 
Leakage in this game of Chinese whispers is enormous.

Despite these drawbacks, face-to-face communication receives the vast 
majority of attention from policymakers, and the lion's share of the budget.

Mediated communication does not suffer from these problems. Of course, it 
has its own drawbacks (distribution, illiteracy, cost of production, etc.). 
But by and large it is highly complementary to face-to-face communication.

Despite this, mediated communication is typically neglected and underfunded 
in agriculture (less so in other sectors, such as health). Information 
materials supposedly intended for farmers are written in scientific jargon, 
and far too few copies are printed to make an impact. Budget cuts means 
fewer titles, and fewer copies of each title, are printed.

There is huge potential for using all forms of media to complement extension 
efforts. Extension workers who have reference materials they can use, and 
training materials they can hand out to farmers, are likely to be far more 
effective. Many countries already have radio and TV programmes on farming, 
but they have little involvement from research institutes. There are 
interesting experiments to make information on technologies available via 
the internet. And a small reduction in the budget for face-to-face 
communication would enable the number of copies of extension publications to 
be increased dramatically.

Suggestion for DFID: support agricultural research and extension 
institutions to be more innovative in their approaches to communication, and 
especially, to put more resources into mediated communication.

Paul Mundy
<address removed>
www.mamud.com



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