The WorldAgInfo Design Team was given the opportunity to explore the landscape of agricultural education and information systems in South Asia and Africa. The goal of the project is to recommend potential areas of investment that will improve the effectiveness of agricultural education and ultimately the practice of small-scale agriculture at the local level.
Smallholder farmers in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.
More cell phone use was found than expected. However, agricultural information was not often available or sought via cell phone. Though many areas are constrained by access, building data bases which make real time agricultural information available to farmers by cell phone is a promising area to pursue.
Traditional print media area still an important source of information for many (literate) smallholders.Perhaps technology-delivered alternatives can be developed to more closely parallel those traditional delivery systems.
Smallholders seem open to new ideas – new crops and new sources of income, but in general they lack the infrastructure support that would give them confidence to try, since they lack good safety nets and have little margin for failure. Exploring alternatives would seem to be a good investment.