Working Group One

Working group members drew from new or ongoing program experiences to discuss the following

questions:

- What evidence do you have for profitability of this technology in your target population? Does

today’s discussion challenge your evidence?

- What strategies are you currently using to promote adoption?

- What are some technology adoption (or profitability) challenges in the field?

o What are key questions that need to be answered?

EVIDENCE

Groups explored existing evidence for profitability of technologies and identified areas where more

evidence was needed. Groups agreed that more evidence was needed on:

- Using mobile technology for extension services for health.

- Barriers to adopting micro irrigation technologies/barriers to low cost water storage solutions.

- Best techniques for introducing new varieties.

- Which situations are best addressed holistically or sequentially?

- Low cost/scale methods for testing large cost/scale problems.

- Information transmission and exchange at the community-level for alternative interventions.

What is already being done that can be applied on a larger scale?

- How mobile technologies can be used to provide services and information.

- How mobile phones can help with gender disparity issues and allow women to get information

they normally wouldn’t have.

- Using conventional mobile technology to create educational programs. Is providing information

increasing farmer incomes? How can communication technologies lead to diversified farming?

- The best strategy for promotion and how to get the private sector to work together.

- Technology adoption rates.

- How to access and aggregate market, service information from NGOs and others.

- Knowledge generation and feedback to communities. Adapting technologies (including

strategies) with evidence that they “work” in the view of the potential adopters.

- Linking formal and informal agricultural financial systems. How do we improve these systems?

- Typology of farmers. Data should be recorded and separated out by age, level of education,

gender roles, large vs. small landholders.

- What communities want and need; how they define “success”. Look across projects and value

chains to distill lessons.

STRATEGIES FOR PROMOTION

Groups mentioned the following when discussing strategies for promoting technology adoption:

- Consider the five cultural characteristics that are important for adoption: Independence,

masculinity, long term orientation, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance.

- Information credibility and availability, people should not be receiving conflicting information.

- Knowledge of end user requirements at a granular enough level to drive technology

development.

- In need of a learning framework to help with knowledge management.

- Qualitative data (i.e. on changed behaviors and relationships) in addition to quantitative data.

- Strategies for promotion:

o Tying inputs information (“extension”) to input purchase (private sector)

o Public sector provision of extension on diversification/intensification of natural resource

management

o Building social capital through group formation (NGOs)

TECHNOLOGY ADOPTION CHALLENGES

In terms of identifying technology adoption challenges in the field, groups formulated the following:

Mobile Technology:

- Since the farmer extension ratio is low, how do we bridge this gap? With mobile technology we

can get (printed) information to farmers digitally, but is digital information used?

- Does mobile technology reduce transport and other costs to access information like meetings?

- Does mobile technology have the ability to cut gender disparity in access to information?

- How can we use conventional mobile technology to create a farmer learning community? How

do we then integrate complementary high-end technology?

- The pros to mobile technology:

o Lower cost/time to access information

o Bridging the gender gap

o Potentially higher quality information

o Provides platform to advertise new services eg. insurance

- However, learning how to digitally access information takes time, and some information

transfers may only be plausible in face to face situations.

Other technologies:

- Farmer practices (current/proven) - Seeds, crops, (“traditional” inputs) -- have resulted in a shift to high value crops (soy, mango) - Credit innovations, processing innovations (value chain, market). Outcomes include: fixing of

prices as a result of market information, pre-post (FMN/GNAFF), and pre-post assessment of incomes with crop diversification and unequal distribution in land cultivated (MAES)

KEY QUESTIONS

Additionally, groups identified key questions addressing technology adoption challenges in the field:

- How do we know its profitability? Although people are already making it work, we need real

farmer testing over time.

- Taking best practices via “technology filtering”/vetting from India to Africa Feed the Future

funded project: from home gardens for nutrition to intensification of production, to using videos

for farmer-to-farmer extension, ICT nutrition messages, mechanization.

- Questioning the “technology” assumption

o The amount of hardware sitting around that farmers haven’t adopted is huge.

o Soft strategies/innovation just as important as hardware in addressing perceived needs.

Social innovations, e.g. small savings groups, are local and key.

- Who’s defining evidence and success? “They” may have impacts and “success” in mind that

weren’t at all part of measurable, expected results that is more valuable.

o Matching intervention with population can be a decision from the top, but evidence

from researchers can reveal unintended impacts.