Documenting Extension Approaches of Selected Development Organizations

Seventy-five percent of the world’s poor live in rural areas and the majority of these people depend on agriculture to survive.1 Enhancing farmers’ and agricultural workers’ livelihoods is essential to addressing rural poverty. To address this need, input providers and other agricultural actors along the value chain need improved access to relevant, credible, and actionable information on best production practices, inputs, and marketing. Traditionally, governments have been responsible for providing extension services and disseminating information to farmers. Over time, however, a wide range of groups have begun to engage with farmers and other actors along value chains to provide a much broader pool of extension and advisory services (EAS). These groups include actors from governments, research centers, universities, civil society, private sector entities, and non-governmental development organizations. To improve our understanding of extension and development approaches, this study analyzes interviews with nineteen such Washington, D.C.-based development organizations with the goal of better understanding:

1.  these organizations’ EAS approaches and the factors in their approaches that are often associated with success,
2.  specific components of approaches and programs that are unique to each organization, 
3. common challenges they have overcome or are working to overcome, and
4. areas identified for improvement.

Several common trends across organizations emerged from these interviews. We believe that these findings and lessons learned can contribute to organizational understanding of best practices, as well as foster a larger dialogue on how the approaches used by non-governmental development organizations’ contribute to improved service provision to farmers.