Jenny C. Aker (2011). Center for Global Development Working Paper 269, September. Forthcoming in Agricultural Economics.

This paper makes the case for mobile phone based agricultural extension services.

Extension services have been an important policy tool for improving agricultural productivity in the developing world.  500,000 agricultural extension workers were employed in 2005, 95% of these by public organizations.  Unfortunately however, there have been few studies of the effectiveness of such programs.  Some scholars have criticized extension services for high costs, failure to achieve scale, and low accountability.

Some have suggested mobile phones as a new vehicle for improved and low cost agricultural extension services.  Starting in 2007, mobile-phone based applications using voice, short message service (SMS), radio, and internet service have been launched as a way to deliver information to farmers.  Yet these new options remain unevaluated and it is unclear to what degree they may be a complement or substitute for traditional extension services such as training and visit, farmer field schools, and fee-for-service models.  The training and visit model was promoted by the World Bank in over 70 countries between 1975 and 1995.  Farmer field schools originated in an effort to address integrated pest management in Asia.  Fee-for-service models generally include private initiatives in which farmers request services from extension agents.

Studies of the effectiveness of these agricultural extension models suggest mixed results.  There are many statistical challenges and endogeneity problems in assessing program impact.  In addition, many extension programs are not functioning at their full potential due to limited scale, unfavorable policy environments, weak linkages between universities and extension services, low accountability and motivation of field staff, and little feedback on the impact programs are having on farmers. 

Akers suggests that mobile phones may be an ideal vehicle for the delivery of agricultural extension services, even more so than radios, newspapers, landlines, fax machines, e-mail, the internet, or travel in person.  In particular, she argues that mobile phones can improve farmers' access to information about agricultural technologies and adoption in six ways.

First, they can improve access to private information.  Second, they can increase access to public information through extension services.  Third, they can improve farmers' management of input and output supply chains.  Fourth, they can facilitate the delivery of other services such as mobile banking.  Fifth, they can increase the accountability of extension programs through visit verifications and production updates.  Sixth, they could potentially increase linkages with research centers. 

Other ICT-based technologies have been used for agricultural extension with some success, such as voice-base information delivery services, radio dial-up and broadcasts, SMS blasts, and e-learning programs.  Akers concludes by outlining several field experiments that might be be used to assess the efficacy of ICT-based agricultural extension services.