Knowledge and communication is an important resource for agriculture and can contribute substantially to ensure food security and sustainability by creating awareness and skill development through access to information. The initial and most prominent player of knowledge delivery is public sector extension services, which from past few years, are usually criticized for their ineffective targeting, poor reach and the huge administrative cost of delivering information. Since past few years, the drastic increase in mobile penetration even in rural areas has lead to evolution of ICT-based extension services models to disseminate agriculture related information. The overall goal of using the mobile phone-enabled information delivery mechanism is to have inclusive growth by reducing the knowledge gap between large and small farmers and by creating awareness. Thus with this background, this chapters specific objectives apart from identifying potential needs of information and the existing sources, includes the meta analysis of mobile impact studies mainly in Asia and Africa in terms of improving farmers socio-economic conditions by being better connected to extension services, improved access to markets and better agronomic information. The expected impact of different types of information are a) an increase in productivity, through informed decision making about crop choice, seed varieties, agricultural inputs, agronomic practices and plant protection b) a reduction in production costs through the adoption of improved and quality inputs and technologies, and better management practices and c) improved incomes resulting from reduced costs and better price realization for produce. However, the impact of mobiles as a mode of providing information for farming will depend on how mobile networks are able to link the farmers to all the required information in a timely and accurate manner.

Socioeconomics Program

English

Lucia Segura

INT3115

CIMMYT Staff Publications Collection