Evidence from an Extension Network Experiment
Innovation is necessary in agriculture to achieve food security particularly in Africa and accelerate overall growth in the region. Despite availability of yield-enhancing technologies, adoption rates in Sub-Saharan Africa remain low. A growing body of literature identifies information failures as an obstacle to the technological diffusion process.
Agricultural extension services are designed to facilitate the diffusion of innovations from lab to farm. In developing countries, they account for large shares of government expenditures in agriculture. Extension is designed to enable lab-to-farm technology diffusion. These decentralized models assume that information flows from researchers to extension workers, and from extension agents to contact farmers (CFs).
Contact farmers should then train other farmers in their communities. This type of model may fail to address informational inefficiencies and accountability issues. This study looks at a field experiment run to measure the impact of augmenting the CF model with a direct CF training on the diffusion of a new technology.
In the experiment all villages have CFs and access the same extension network. In treatment villages, CFs additionally receive a three-day, central training on the new technology. The study tracks information transmission through two nodes of the extension network: from extension agents to contact farmers, and from contact farmers to other farmers.
Results:
Directly training contact farmers leads to a large, statistically significant increase in adoption among contact farmers. However, higher levels of CF adoption have limited impact on the behavior of other farmers.
Read the full study here.
Last Updated: Nov 14, 2016
