Businesses and other institutions around the world are increasingly using the term ‘professionalism’ to describe their level of service provision. While some professions, such as medicine and engineering, have been well known and recognised through standard qualifications for many years, others – such as rural advisory services (RAS) – have only recently begun to aspire to a higher level of professionalism.

The landscape of agricultural development has changed dramatically in the past two decades, calling for transformation of the curricula of programmes, courses, and training related to agricultural extension and rural advisory services (RAS) in terms of what is taught, and how. Many higher learning institutions and training providers recognise the need to review and change their existing curricula and/or to develop new ones that are responsive to current market demands. However, there is often limited know-how and capacity to implement successful processes of curriculum development, especially in the extension and RAS community.

The purpose of this note is to highlight the emergence of private sectordelivered RAS that aim to address the gaps in traditional government extension. Private sector RAS can serve a company’s business goals while also providing farmers with the essential agronomic and business knowledge needed to be more productive and earn higher incomes. It is in the private sector’s interest to engage with and improve their clients’ farming practices in order to achieve increased company revenues and profits. This enables them to ensure commercial viability, resulting in long-term mutual benefits for farmers, employees, and shareholders.

Smallholder farmers in developing countries face a number of challenges that impact their productivity and contribution to food security. These include lack of access to financial services (credit, savings, and micro-insurance) and limited access to rural advisory services.

The smallholder farming landscape is rapidly changing owing to current trends that create both challenges and opportunities for rural communities in their efforts to commercialise.In this fast-changing environment, farmers and their rural advisory service (RAS) providers must learn new  skills and find new ways of working together to develop inclusive business models that help link diverse farmers and entrepreneurs to growth markets. One solution to help with rural commercialisation is to support the growing numbers of agripreneurs, who could play a catalytic role in generating new income streams and jobs.

Rural women’s roles and contributions to agriculture remain undervalued and neglected by the sector’s policy- making and implementation processes. Women typically are involved in many aspects of the agricultural value chain, often contributing anywhere from 25 to 75% of the productive labour. However, they generally have less access to rural advisory services (RAS) than men. They also have less access to agricultural inputs, such as fertilisers, technologies, and veterinary services, which reduces their overall productivity. This is particularly a problem in countries in Africa, where women’s agricultural involvement varies from about 30% in the Gambia to 60–80% in Cameroon. 

Enabling Rural Innovation (ERI) is a participatory approach that puts family farmers in the centre of agricultural development. It strengthens their technical, organisational, social and entrepreneurial capacities to shift from subsistence to market–oriented agriculture. It aims at developing profitable agro-enterprises without jeopardising food and nutrition security. Farmer groups are supported in (re-)discovering social, technical, natural and economical resources around them, setting group objectives and monitoring their progress towards them, making market studies, experimenting with different technologies and setting up agro-enterprises while safeguarding their natural resource base.

Videos, especially digital ones, are a relatively new technology. Videos may help to meet the challenges of disseminating information to farmers and reaching the poor, marginalised, women, and young people. Some uses of video in agriculture include raising awareness, stimulating demand for support, farmer-to-farmer extension, training on agricultural innovations, stimulating creativity, and as a tool for documenting and monitoring and evaluation (M&E). 

Following the decline of investments in government extension services in the 1980s and 1990s, community- based extension approaches have become increasingly important. One such approach is farmer-to-farmer extension (F2FE), which is defined here as the provision of training by farmers to farmers, often through the creation of a structure of farmer-trainers. We use ‘farmer-trainer’ as a generic term, even though we recognise that different names (e.g. lead farmer, farmer-promoter, community knowledge worker) may imply different roles. 

In West Africa, during the 1990s, new innovative advisory methods were used that broke with the tradition of top- down public extension focusing on production, and instead helped meet the diversity of producers’ needs by using participatory methods. Management Advice for Family Farms (MAFF) is one of these approaches. MAFF has been adapted for diverse contexts and is today implemented by a wide range of actors, including non-government organisations (NGOs), producer organisations, cotton companies, and government agencies, in several African countries, reaching approximately 100,000 producers. MAFF has recently been further adapted to other contexts, including Myanmar (South East Asia), and Malawi (East Africa).

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.