Purpose: To reflect on the opportunities that a systems understanding of innovation provides for addressing gender issues relevant to women, and to provide some insight on how these might be tackled. Approach: Review of literature relating to gender issues and how they relate to achieving, on the one hand, equity and efficiency goals, and on the…

Purpose: Capacity development for agricultural research and development is missing an opportunity. Initiatives tend to focus on developing capacity of individuals and even when the ultimate aim is social change leave the transformation of individual into social learning largely to chance. I use the lens of social learning systems, particularly…

There is an urgent need to quantify which extension methods are most effective in Africa. The objective of this study was to determine the impact of alternative extension methods on adoption of the triple bagging cowpea storage technology in Niger and Burkina Faso. This study was designed as a quasi-experiment with two alternative extension…

One of the major challenges facing Africa today is ensuring that extension practitioners are well trained to enable them function effectively as facilitators of change at the farmers' level. The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of a mid-career B. Sc. Agricultural Extension Curriculum in meeting the educational needs of…

Two imperatives form the basis of the present paper. The first is the market-driven imperative, vital to production and value-chain development. The second is the knowledge imperative, central to the advancement of human capacity and institutional development. In view of these two imperatives, this paper argues for overhaul in extension toward a…

Assessment of a participatory rural appraisal project in Ethiopia indicated that decentralization of extension in sub-Saharan Africa is an opportunity for farmers and extension agents to collaborate. The congruence of experiential learning and participatory approaches can contribute to the transformation of "top-down" extension…

This discussion of the impact of information services on the agricultural development of the developing countries of Africa. Covers the importance of information and problems of literacy; sources of agricultural information (extension services, radio, films, publications, friends); and the role of library services. Footnotes are included. (EJS)

Communication planning in developing countries is discussed in individual articles on theory, knowledge production and utilization, planning at the regional level, software, and rural development. A nutrition education project and three experiments in developing educational materials with feedback from villagers in Africa are described in the…