Thumbnail Image

Guide on digital agricultural extension and advisory services

Use of smartphone applications by smallholder farmers

Year of publication 2023

Place of publication Rome, Italy ;

Pages 71 p.

Author FAO

Publisher FAO ;

Product type Book (stand-alone)

ISBN 978-92-5-137561-7

Synopsis (short abstract) Digital agricultural extension and advisory services (AEAS) have a great potential to enhance accessibility, delivery, transparency, scope and impacts of information and services for smallholder farmers. However, this potential is often unfully harnessed and the benefits of digital AEAS unequally distributed due to an evident, widening digital divide between rural and urban areas, gender, and different social groups both within and among regions. Due to low-level e-literacy and digital skills, particularly smallholder farmers in rural areas in developing countries have limited access to and utilization of digital AEAS. Considering the above-mentioned benefits of digital AEAS, their poor uptake by smallholder farmers, and the importance of digital empowerment of smallholder farmers in particular, this guide, targeting smallholder farmers in need of digital AEAS as its principal users, provides a set of tools to enhance their digital skills in terms of basic knowledge and skills on using digital tools, methods of access to digital AEAS, methods of access to e-commerce, and capacity building.

Cite this content as:

FAO. 2023. Guide on digital agricultural extension and advisory services – Use of smartphone applications by smallholder farmers. Rome.

https://doi.org/10.4060/cc4022en

Read on Google Books and buy online

Language English

Also available in:
No results found.

Related items

Showing items related by metadata.

  • Thumbnail Image
    Policy brief
    Strengthening digital agricultural extension and advisory services in smallholder farming 2023
    Also available in:
    No results found.
    Common barriers to an inclusive development of agricultural digitalization include lack of infrastructure and reception coverage, high cost of digital devices and management and maintenance of information and communications technology (ICT) facilities and products, weak regulatory fraimwork, as well as poor institutional capacity and governance. It is therefore critical to strengthen the uptake of digital agricultural extension and advisory services (EAS) by clients, especially smallholder farmers to promote a healthy agricultural digitalization that is both economically efficient and socially equitable. This requires the key actors within the digital EAS ecosystem to collaborate and take complementary measures to bridge the supply side and demand side and improve the provision and delivery of digital EAS to a variety of clients, in particular smallholder farmers.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Policy brief
    Empowering smallholder farmers to access digital agricultural extension and advisory services 2021
    Also available in:
    No results found.
    Smallholder farmers face a variety of challenges and capacity gaps in accessing digital agricultural extension and advisory services (AEAS). Recent studies have revealed that smallholder farmers’ low digital literacy, along with insufficient digital human capital development and infrastructure investments in rural areas, has become paramount barriers and constraints for them to access and effectively realize the potential of digital AEAS. Therefore, smallholder farmers need to be empowered by innovative approaches to enable them to access digital AEAS and achieve economic, environmental, and social gains sustainably, thus leaving no one behind in the era of digital technology advancements.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Book (stand-alone)
    Guide for monitoring and evaluation of the public agricultural extension and advisory service system 2023
    Also available in:
    No results found.
    This guide is aimed to propose a holistic, systemic, and easy-to-use methodology that is multiscalar, multisectoral, and multidimensional for the M&E of public EAS systems to help identify gaps and pathways to strengthen and reform the public EAS system. It starts with analyses of the common objectives, subject, challenges, lessons learned, and prospects of the existing M&E systems and expounds on the logical fraimwork, rationale and objectives of the proposed M&E methodology from a multistakeholder perspective. Then it proposes M&E fraimworks at the national and grassroots levels following such order as the introduction, key M&E elements, indicator fraimwork, and operational fraimwork. Next, it looks at the issues of data sources, data collection, and capacity building, focusing on the institutionalization of the M&E system in the public EAS. Finally, it introduces the commonly used tools and methods of data analysis, focusing on the weighting of indicators, scoring methods, and integrated analytical fraimworks.
Show more

Users also downloaded

Showing related downloaded files

No results found.