Value Chain Glossary: Extension Services

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Extension Services

Organized education for people in rural areas, usually by technical experts in agricultural practice.

Extension services can be delivered to achieve various ends:

Technology Transfer. Commonly practiced in the the 1970’s and 1980’s when governments established Training and Visit systems across Asia. Technology transfer involves a top-down approach that delivers specific recommendations to farmers about the practices they should adopt.

Advisory work. Seen today where government organizations or private consulting companies respond to farmers inquiries with technical recommendations. Projects managed by donor agencies and NGOs that use participatory approaches to promote development approaches and technologies. For example, USAID employs extension and advisory services that recognize the more complex agricultural knowledge and information systems that serve diverse needs of farmers.

Human resource development. Dominates in Europe and North America, when universities gave training to rural people who did not have the resources to attend full-time courses. It continues today in the outreach activities of colleges around the world. Top-down teaching methods are employed, but students are expected to make their own decisions about how to use the knowledge they acquire.

Facilitation for empowerment. This paradigm involves methods such as experiential learning and farmer-to-farmer exchanges. Knowledge is gained through interactive processes and the participants are encouraged to make their own decisions. The best know examples in Asia are projects that use Farmer Field Schools or participatory technology development.

Communication processes that conform to each of these four paradigms are currently being organized under the name "extension" in one part of the world or another. Pragmatically, if not ideologically, all of these activities are agricultural extension.

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