ICTworks

Agricultural advisory services generally rely on interpersonal knowledge transfers by agricultural extension agents who visit farmers to provide information. This approach is not always effective and has proved hard to scale sustainably, particularly in highly dispersed smallholder farming systems. ICTs are advanced as a promising way to overcome many of the problems associated with conventional agricultural extension.

In the ICT to Provide Agricultural Advice to Smallholder Farmers study, we evaluated a comprehensive ICT-mediated agricultural extension approach consisting of three components—video, IVR, and SMS—introduced as incremental treatments to small-scale maize farmers in eastern Uganda.

Study Characteristics

These components combine several distinct characteristics designed to lift both information and behavioral constraints to technical change.

• Video: The video component combines information provision with packaging in a medium that relies on farmer-actors speaking in the local language in a manner relatable to the farmers viewing the video. However, the video medium tends to be passive in nature, potentially limiting information retention by viewers, especially where there is a lag between viewing and use of the information.
• Interactive Voice Response: To address this shortcoming, we introduce an IVR service, which allows the farmer to play a more active role in information acquisition through the navigation of menu-based choices leading to prerecorded messages containing the same information as provided in the video.
• Short Message Service: Finally, given that farmers’ decision making may be less related to information inefficiencies and more behavioral in nature, we introduce a series of SMS messages to remind farmers to use key inputs or apply key practices at relevant points during the season. We test this approach with nearly 4,000 smallholder maize farmers.

Testing Effectiveness

To assess the effectiveness of the video component, we compare outcomes for a random subset of farmers who were shown an informational video to a random subset of farmers who were shown a placebo video. From this initial treatment group, two-thirds of the farmers who were shown the video were randomly assigned to receive an IVR starter kit that encouraged them call into the IVR service.

From this second treatment group, half of the farmers were then randomly assigned to receive a series of eight time-sensitive SMS reminders related to the recommended practices and technologies, along with a reminder to use the IVR service to obtain additional information.

The design of this experiment allows us to estimate the effect of the video treatment as well as the additional effects of the IVR encouragement and SMS treatments. Effectiveness was measured in terms of gains in content knowledge, adoption of recommended practices, use of recommended inputs, and increases in production-related measures.

Findings: Video Beats IVR and SMS

Findings indicate that in our study site and context, the video-enabled extension approach significantly affected a range of outcomes.

We find evidence of increases in knowledge outcomes, particularly for new practices and technologies; increases in the adoption of recommended practices, particularly those that were new and otherwise unknown to farmers; and increases in the use of certain types of fertilizers (urea and organic). Importantly, we also find evidence of increases in maize yields on the order of 10.5%.

Although we do not find effects of the additional IVR treatment on knowledge-, adoption-, or production-related outcomes, there is some evidence to suggest that farmers who received the IVR encouragement were more likely to use hybrid maize seed, which is one of several important inputs to improving on-farm productivity.

Finally, we do not find effects of the additional SMS treatment on any outcomes of interest.

The Promise of Video for Farmer Behavior Change

The significant and positive effects of the video-enabled approach found in our field experiment are encouraging for several reasons.

• First, they are potentially relevant not just to our study population but also to a wider population of small-scale farmers who depend on maize for both production and consumption in eastern and southern Africa.
• Second, they are generally consistent with other studies that make use of video.
• Third, they extend the body of evidence on ICT-enabled extension to a new country, context, and design, deepening the literature on this topic.

It is less clear what we can learn from the null results for the additional treatments. In other studies, IVR or similar hotlines have been shown to have impact, and SMS messaging has similarly been shown to be successful in a variety of contexts. Therefore, the lack of evidence of impact may be specific to the nature of the incremental design and results may be quite different in, for instance, a parallel design.

But even in the narrow context of our experiment, where an effort was made to study particular characteristics of the interventions such as the demand-driven nature of IVR or the ability of SMS to make information more salient, it is not clear if the lack of impact should be interpreted as significant for future work on this topic in either the same or other contexts or designs.

A lightly edited synopsis of ICT to Provide Agricultural Advice to Smallholder Farmers study by Bjorn Van Campenhout, David J. Spielman, and Els Lecoutere.