Making a Difference
CGIAR IMPACT AREAS:
Gender equality, youth & social inclusion
Poverty reduction, livelihoods & jobs
Developing Local Extension Capacity (DLEC) project:
Finding more effective ways to deliver vital information and innovation to farmers
farming households benefited from improved extension and advisory services provided by Developing Local Extension Capacity (DLEC)
1.3 Million
This review of research outcomes was written by Penina Muoki, Program Manager, Innovation Policy and Scaling Unit, IFPRI; and Brian McNamara, Program Coordinator, Markets, Trade, and Institutions Unit, IFPRI. The CEROS site was designed by Lee Dixon, Senior Graphic and Web Designer, Communications and Public Affairs Unit, IFPRI.
About IFPRI The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), a research center of CGIAR, provides research-based policy solutions to sustainably reduce poverty and end hunger and malnutrition in low- and middle-income countries. IFPRI was established in 1975 to identify and analyze alternative national and international strategies and policies for meeting the food needs of the developing world, with particular emphasis on low-income countries and on the poorer groups in those countries. Partnerships, communications, capacity strengthening, and data and knowledge management are essential components for translating IFPRI’s research to action and impact. The Institute’s regional and country programs play a critical role in responding to demand for food policy research and in delivering holistic support to country-led development. IFPRI collaborates with partners around the world.
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This blog post is part of a special monthly series entitled “Making a Difference,” documenting the impact of IFPRI's projects and initiatives. These stories reflect the wide breadth of the Institute's research, communications, and capacity-strengthening activities around the world, in fulfillment of its mission. The blog series has been peer-reviewed by IFPRI's Impact Committee members.
Carrying out these three types of activities in various settings allowed DLEC to develop and deliver evidence-based recommendations to improve extension service delivery. Ultimately, monitoring efforts showed that DLEC was able to provide improved EAS practices for 1.3 million farming households, primarily in Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Nigeria.
In addition to supporting these farming households, DLEC also strengthened four regional and six country communities of practice forums within the Global Forum for Rural Advisory Services (GFRAS), made up of regional networks of extension actors that provide advocacy and leadership on extension for sustainable development. Country forums are the building blocks of the GFRAS regional networks, which are best positioned to share information about conditions and developments in a specific country to the regional and international level. They also provide entry points for regional and international initiatives in improving rural advisory services. The initiative also catalyzed more than $6 million in funding to improve extension services in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, and Uganda.
DLEC’s Impact
IFPRI is reaching the lives of millions of people through its contribution to policies and programs that reduce poverty, hunger, and malnutrition. This blog series highlights how IFPRI’s research is contributing to policy decisions and investments made by governments, development organizations, and other partners, and making a difference for food and nutrition security in developing countries around the world.
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tailored to inform and support a wide range of audiences, from practitioners to policymakers: diagnostic studies, training modules, research briefs, project reports, journal articles, and social media posts
100+ products
including governments, nongovernmental organizations, and private companies, adopted DLEC recommendations to improve extension and advisory services
77 partners across 17 countries,
Farming requires accurate, timely information — about weather, soil, seeds, fertilizers, the best available technologies, and finance, among other things — and improving access to information is crucial for farmers to thrive. Agricultural extension and advisory services (EAS) around the world are a vital conduit for improving farmers’ access to information of all kinds and key to helping them apply it.
In 2016, a consortium of development practitioners and researchers convened by Digital Green and IFPRI set out to bring new attention to the evolving role of EAS — providing new information and support on ways to boost production or improve farms’ environmental sustainability. The result was the Feed the Future Developing Local Extension Capacity (DLEC) project, supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which ran from 2016 to 2021.
DLEC aimed to strengthen EAS by identifying gaps in extension and advisory services and testing innovative solutions to close them. In general, EAS enables farmers and others to learn about inputs, technologies, and practices, and innovate to meet their own needs. Effective services focus not just on replicating successful outcomes — they also encourage adaptation and scaling to maximize productivity and welfare effects. A central element of EAS success has been shifting practice away from one-way, top-down messaging to farmers, toward cultivating relationships between farmers and rural service providers, accompanied by a greater focus on empowering women and engaging youth.
Yet there is no one-size-fits-all approach to pursuing these goals, so DLEC’s task of designing and implementing effective, scalable EAS solutions was complex. As a result, the project’s recommendations were specific to each country and its unique food system challenges.
Through partnership-based, locally tailored activities, DLEC worked with USAID missions, public and private sector actors, and civil society organizations to generate, document, and share evidence on how EAS programs can become more effective and sustainable.
Over the course of five years, DLEC implemented three types of activities across 17 countries:
In Nigeria, for example, an extension program that shared information through demonstration plots coupled with videos and farmer discussions helped to double the quantity of milk processed and reduce the spoilage rejection rate from 40% to zero. Extension advice to a group of Nigerian rice farmers on improved agronomic practices resulted in a 23%–25% yield increase compared with control plots.
Diagnostic studies
Assessments of national extension systems, such as the initial Rwanda study.
Communities of practice
Engagements
On-the-ground activities and action research, as illustrated in the four examples below.
Physical and virtual forums to promote knowledge exchange at country, regional or global levels, such as the Guinea forum (also below).
A review of DLEC’s studies and reports provides insights into how it strengthened local extension capacity. Across the countries studied, several factors proved crucial in maximizing DLEC’s impact:
Four engagements: How DLEC maximized impact
Extending access
and reach
Building local partnerships
Customizing programming
Innovation and experimentation
Improving partnerships can help EAS providers reach more people, including under-serviced populations, and aid in localizing content — benefiting users in various ways. Considering the importance of relationships in EAS programming, DLEC’s EAS initiative in Guinea aimed to strengthen partnerships among agriculture sector actors and in the process, improve livelihoods and economic opportunities for farmers.
DLEC first surveyed EAS capacity in Guinea to understand the specific needs of the country’s EAS ecosystem — finding a lack of capacity for partnership, advocacy, networking, and knowledge management among most providers. In response, the DLEC team created an online repository of existing extension actors for enhanced coordination. For each actor, the repository shows the geographic location, type of service provided, and type of actor (e.g., public, NGO, private). DLEC then provided partnership development and fundraising training to these actors.
DLEC and the GFRAS regional West and Central Africa Network of Agricultural and Rural Advisory Services (RESCAR-AOC) also worked with EAS actors and Guinea’s National Agency for Rural Promotion and Agricultural Advisory Services (ANPROCA) to launch a national EAS forum known as FOGUICA: Forum Guinéen de Conseil Agricole (Guinean Forum for Agricultural Advisory Services). FOGUICA was built to improve capacity and coverage of EAS and to coordinate and exchange knowledge. Because of DLEC’s strong partnership with RESCAR-AOC, DLEC was able to quickly implement this forum of actors linked to the regional and global extension networks of GFRAS.
Overall, DLEC found that local partnerships were a key factor that allowed for better alignment of extension priorities and activities. Across the portfolio, projects were more successful when local actors drove the engagement, enabling farmers to benefit from information relevant to their contexts.
Increasing the impact of EAS systems can at times be as simple as improving accessibility: the more people these programs reach, the greater the potential benefit. In Ethiopia, extension staff traditionally provided information to farmers through farm visits, group meetings, or training sessions. For the past 10 years, however, extension workers have experimented with locally produced videos to reach more farmers and provide information on recommended practices in a more salient and consistent manner.
DLEC evaluated the impact of the video-enabled approach on farmers’ access to extension, farmer knowledge, adoption of new technologies and practices, and farm-level yields. A key feature of one of these efforts, the video-mediated extension approach introduced by Digital Green, is its “hyper-localization,” featuring context-specific content using local actors speaking local languages.
This approach was successful in increasing access to extension, improving farmer knowledge, and accelerating the adoption of recommended crop management practices. These results led to the Ethiopian Ministry of Agriculture investing more funds to institutionalize the video-enabled extension model — reaching an additional 438,488 households. In addition to this scaling effort, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office of the United Kingdom, and the Government of Ethiopia invested $5.5 million to adapt and expand digitally enabled extension programs to multiple communities and value chains across the country.
In Rwanda, DLEC focused on strengthening EAS by customizing extension training and learning tools for extension agents and farmers. This activity included adapting the New Extensionist Learning Kit (NELK) to the Rwandan context. NELK is a learning tool for extension field staff consisting of 16 educational modules used in over 35 countries and eight universities. DLEC customized several of these NELK modules for Rwanda’s local contexts, including the e-extension module, which was field tested for the first time in Rwanda. This module teaches the use of remote electronic approaches that can complement physical, in-person activities. During rollout, DLEC ensured these customized modules were hosted by a local organization with the ability to ensure that the toolkit was properly used, disseminated, and implemented. The field test results were presented to the University of Rwanda so it could establish a professional certificate program for training extension workers.
Since the completion of this intervention in Rwanda, the Youth Engagement in Agriculture Network (YEAN) adopted the NELK toolkit as part of the coursework for youth extensionists in their Private Extension and Advisory Learning Experience (PEALE) program. The program is currently hosting 55 youth in its first cohort.
Historically, many agricultural advisory services have been geared toward the male members within a household, reinforcing inequality in agricultural decision-making. This imbalance persists, even though women perform an extensive amount of agricultural work and contribute to many farming decisions. Thus, biases within EAS affect women’s ability to make informed decisions and therefore diminish their power.
In DLEC’s engagement in Uganda, researchers conducted a gendered field experiment among maize-farming households in the country’s east. The experiment tested video-enabled extension messaging and its effects on outcomes in maize cultivation. Results showed that providing information to both male and female heads of household led to an increase in joint decision-making, knowledge retention, and uptake of practices. Targeting women directly with relevant information increased agency, access to resources, and achievements in farming. These findings ultimately steered the Ugandan extension system toward a more effective and gender-intentional set of digitally enabled practices. Thus, the effort generated evidence to validate investments in integrated digital extension programs and gendered approaches and contributed to the overall EAS knowledge base.
Ethiopia
Guinea
Rwanda
Uganda
AGRIWIN LTD provides training to the workers of agriculture consultancy beneficiaries, contributing to their future farm management skills.
Case Study: Rwanda
AGRIWIN LTD, an agriculture consultancy, employs innovative techniques like top-working to enhance inferior trees rather than uprooting them. DLEC served AGRIWIN LTD and other EAS providers to help improve and expand their reach.
To minimize chemical usage, they provide various herbs and spices for pest and disease control on beneficiaries' farms.
Prior to engaging in any agricultural consultancy activities, they carefully consider soil erosion concerns.
Erosion control, involving the use of trenches, is implemented on farms in Rwamagana.
Desireable fruit tree varieties are actively sought out at the market and propogated on site.
Recognizing the importance of water management, the organization's technicians assist farmers in designing irrigation systems to address water insufficiency challenges in crop cultivation.
AGRIWIN LTD either raises the seedlings provided to farmers or sources them from fruit tree nurseries involved in the organization's agricultural consultation.
To further instill confidence, farmers, referred to as "beneficiaries," are granted a two-month guarantee on the work provided by the consultant.
To minimize chemical usage, they provide various herbs and spices for pest and disease control on beneficiaries' farms.
AGRIWIN LTD provides training to the workers of agriculture consultancy beneficiaries, contributing to their future farm management skills.
To minimize chemical usage, they provide various herbs and spices for pest and disease control on beneficiaries' farms.
Prior to engaging in any agricultural consultancy activities, they carefully consider soil erosion concerns.
Erosion control, involving the use of trenches, is implemented on farms in Rwamagana.
Prior to engaging in any agricultural consultancy activities, they carefully consider soil erosion concerns.
Desirable fruit tree varieties are actively sought out at the market and propagated on site.
Erosion control, involving the use of trenches, is implemented on farms in Rwamagana.
Recognizing the importance of water management, the organization's technicians assist farmers in designing irrigation systems to address water insufficiency challenges in crop cultivation.
Desireable fruit tree varieties are actively sought out at the market and propogated on site.
AGRIWIN LTD either raises the seedlings provided to farmers or sources them from fruit tree nurseries involved in the organization's agricultural consultation.
Recognizing the importance of water management, the organization's technicians assist farmers in designing irrigation systems to address water insufficiency challenges in crop cultivation.
To further instill confidence, farmers, referred to as "beneficiaries," are granted a two-month guarantee on the work provided by the consultant.
AGRIWIN LTD either raises the seedlings provided to farmers or sources them from fruit tree nurseries involved in the organization's agricultural consultation.
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Effective and sustainable EAS programs are crucial for empowering farmers, improving agricultural practices, and promoting rural development. By generating evidence-based recommendations, fostering knowledge exchange, and implementing innovative solutions, DLEC has made a significant contribution to strengthening local extension capacity. The successful outcomes and partnerships established by DLEC serve as a model for future initiatives and efforts to enhance agricultural extension and advisory services globally.
As demonstrated by the above examples, the success and breadth of DLEC’s impact can be attributed to four key factors: extending reach and access, fostering local partnerships, customization of programming, and innovating and experimenting. Through diagnostic studies, engagements, and communities of practice, DLEC identified gaps in EAS and implemented innovative solutions to address them. Over the course of five years, DLEC built a foundation that future EAS efforts can use to deliver information to more people.
Conclusion
This review of research outcomes was written by Kristin Davis, Senior Research Fellow, Natural Resources and Resilience Unit, IFPRI; and Eleanor Jones, Program Coordinator, Foresight and Policy Modeling Unit, IFPRI. The CEROS site was designed by Lee Dixon, Senior Graphic Designer, Communications and Public Affairs Unit, IFPRI.
About IFPRI The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), a research center of CGIAR, provides research-based policy solutions to sustainably reduce poverty and end hunger and malnutrition in low- and middle-income countries. IFPRI was established in 1975 to identify and analyze alternative national and international strategies and policies for meeting the food needs of the developing world, with particular emphasis on low-income countries and on the poorer groups in those countries. Partnerships, communications, capacity strengthening, and data and knowledge management are essential components for translating IFPRI’s research to action and impact. The Institute’s regional and country programs play a critical role in responding to demand for food policy research and in delivering holistic support to country-led development. IFPRI collaborates with partners around the world.
Back to top
IFPRI is reaching the lives of millions of people through its contribution to policies and programs that reduce poverty, hunger, and malnutrition. This blog series highlights how IFPRI’s research is contributing to policy decisions and investments made by governments, development organizations, and other partners, and making a difference for food and nutrition security in developing countries around the world.
View More blog posts
Making a Difference
Developing Local Extension Capacity (DLEC) project:
Finding more effective ways to deliver vital information and innovation to farmers
This blog post is part of a special monthly series entitled “Making a Difference,” documenting the impact of IFPRI's projects and initiatives. These stories reflect the wide breadth of the Institute's research, communications, and capacity-strengthening activities around the world, in fulfillment of its mission. The blog series has been peer-reviewed by IFPRI's Impact Committee members.
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This review of research outcomes was written by Penina Muoki, Program Manager, Innovation Policy and Scaling Unit, IFPRI; and Brian McNamara, Program Coordinator, Markets, Trade, and Institutions Unit, IFPRI. The CEROS site was designed by Lee Dixon, Senior Graphic and Web Designer, Communications and Public Affairs Unit, IFPRI.
About IFPRI The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), a research center of CGIAR, provides research-based policy solutions to sustainably reduce poverty and end hunger and malnutrition in low- and middle-income countries. IFPRI was established in 1975 to identify and analyze alternative national and international strategies and policies for meeting the food needs of the developing world, with particular emphasis on low-income countries and on the poorer groups in those countries. Partnerships, communications, capacity strengthening, and data and knowledge management are essential components for translating IFPRI’s research to action and impact. The Institute’s regional and country programs play a critical role in responding to demand for food policy research and in delivering holistic support to country-led development. IFPRI collaborates with partners around the world.
Back to top
IFPRI is reaching the lives of millions of people through its contribution to policies and programs that reduce poverty, hunger, and malnutrition. This blog series highlights how IFPRI’s research is contributing to policy decisions and investments made by governments, development organizations, and other partners, and making a difference for food and nutrition security in developing countries around the world.
View More blog posts