Essential Competencies of Frontline Agricultural Extension Professionals

Suvedi, M., and Sasidhar, P.V.K. (Eds.). (2024). Essential Competencies of Frontline Agricultural Extension Professionals. East Lansing, Michigan, USA: Alliance for African Partnership, Michigan State University. #461 pp.

This training manual was funded by Michigan State University through the Alliance for African Partnership (AAP) for a 2021 Partnerships for Innovative Research in Africa (PIRA) grant award titled ‘Strengthening Agricultural Extension Training in the MSU Alliance for African Partnership (AAP) Consortium Partners in Africa’. 

All the papers are available at https://www.canr.msu.edu/people/murari_suvedi

To serve farmers and agribusiness operators better, we need to prepare new generations of agriculture development professionals, change our extension curriculum and pedagogy and prepare competent extension professionals. 

To improve training of extension professionals, the editors of this manual conducted three comprehensive studies on essential competencies of extension professionals in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa: 

1. Assessment of Core Competencies of Livestock Extension Professionals in India (2016): USAID – MEAS Funded Project. 
2. Strengthening Agricultural Extension Training in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka and Nepal) - Process Skills and Competency Gaps in Undergraduate Agricultural Extension Curriculum (2020): Funded by US Department of State under Fulbright programme. 
3. Strengthening Agricultural Extension Training in Nigeria, Malawi, South Africa, Uganda, and Kenya (2023): Funded by AAP-PIRA (Alliance for African Partnership - Partnerships for Innovative Research in Africa), Michigan State University. 

These studies identified essential job competencies of extension professionals, assessed whether these key competencies were covered in current UG extension curriculum, determined the gaps in essential job competencies of extension professionals and recommended competency-based curriculum with 11 process skills and core competencies and 97 subcompetencies for their inclusion in the UG agricultural extension curriculum. 

Extracts

The extension system is challenged to serve as the connecting actor in complex agricultural innovation systems, to go beyond technology transfer to facilitation, beyond training to learning,  assisting farmers to form groups, dealing with marketing issues, addressing public interest issues in rural areas such as resource conservation, health, monitoring of food security and agricultural production, food safety, nutrition, family education, and youth development, and partnering with a broad range of service providers and other agencies.  This calls for new skills and competencies for extension professionals, apart from those they  traditionally possessed. (page 277)

In general, innovators and earlier adopters have more formal education, higher social status (larger farms, higher income), greater exposure to mass media, greater exposure to interpersonal channels of communication, greater extension agent contact, greater social participation (e.g., community leader, farmer association leader) and more contact with persons outside their community than later adopters. However, it should be noted that individuals do not occupy permanent positions in the characterization of the adopter categories for all innovations. For instance, an individual who 

falls into the category of laggard in innovation A may become an innovator for innovation B. (page 102)

The multitude of ICT initiatives in agricultural extension plays an important role in revitalizing the interaction between extension services and farmers by making services more demand-driven, up-to-date, and inclusive. However, ICT is but one element in the wider transformation toward pluralistic extension services. Francis and Addom (2014) argue that extension alone cannot lift people out of poverty without the right combination of policies, technologies, and market opportunities. Context specificity is critical. To be effective, it is essential to choose the ICT tool that is the most appropriate in a specific situation and context, such as in affordability (McNamara et al., 2011). This depends both on the type of information to be transferred as well as on the characteristics of the target group. ICTs should not be seen as the sole solution to the challenges associated with agriculture because broad access to more sophisticated and integrated ICTs requires organizational capacity that public sector agricultural extension systems at present lack. (page 155)

Management generally values improvement-oriented studies. Donors and policymakers seek
knowledge-oriented evaluations and studies that answer accountability questions. (...) The extension program or project manager should establish the desired level of outcomes at the outset of a program, project, or policy. The higher up the hierarchy they are, the more time and resources it generally takes to gather data about outcomes, but the more convincing the evidence will be. As a manager, you must decide the trade-off between strong evidence of worth and the cost/time required to gather evidence. The top rung of the ladder shows results related to the long-term benefits or impacts that drive the program or project – for example, “environmentally friendly agricultural production.” Managers typically cannot evaluate at the top level because they cannot isolate other factors that may have led to the long-term result, but it is nevertheless helpful to know what the ultimate expected outcome or impact is. (page 169)

Because of several limitations -- such as availability of baseline data, budget, and absence of a
suitable comparison group -- experimental or quasi-experimental designs may not be feasible
in many contexts. In such situations, extension program evaluators have frequently used non-
experimental evaluation designs to conduct program/project evaluations. Two commonly designs
used evaluation designs are: Pre- vs. Post-program Evaluation page 173)