GFRAS - NOTE 17: mExtension – Mobile Phones for Agricultural Advisory Services

For example

NOTE 9: Integrating Nutrition into Rural Advisory Services and Extension

Burundi ECECHOMartin Karimi 2

There is a heightened awareness globally and within development institutions and governments of the need to better understand the links between agriculture and nutrition, and to decipher the ways in which the agriculture sector can contribute to improved nutrition. The ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of effectively delivering ‘nutritionsensitive agriculture’(1) services to rural households remain even less understood.

Extension workers (through public, private, and nongovernment organisation (NGO) channels) are often thought of as a promising platform or vehicle for the delivery of nutrition knowledge and practices to improve the nutritional health of rural communities because they reach and interact closely with farmers in different settings. They act as significant service providers of crop, livestock, and forestry aspects of food security, consumption, and production.

Article Index

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Introduction

mExtension 1

In the last few decades, information and communication technologies (ICTs) have provided immense opportunities for the social and economic development of rural people, and some technologies have surpassed others. Mobile telephony is one such technology that has developed significantly in the past few years, and the subscription rate in developing countries has gone up from 22 per 100 inhabitants in 2005 to 91.8 per 100 inhabitants in 2015. Mobile technology goes beyond geographic, socio-economic, and cultural barriers and this large increase in mobile subscriptions, along with the recent roll out of 3G and 4G technology, can play a big role in the development of rural people. Mobile phones are devices that can create, store, access, and share information anytime, anywhere. But they are more than that. When teamed with extension and advisory services, they can help improve the livelihoods of rural people by getting much needed timely information to their fingertips at potentially low cost. So-called mobile-based extension and advisory services (mExtension, see Box 1) enable value-added services, such as mobile agro-services and machine to machine services, (1)

which help farmers monitor their crops and farm machinery through mobile phones. While value-added services are generally fairly accessible to all the farmers in rural areas, machine-to-machine services are more cost intensive and require infrastructure that is often not present in developing countries.