Munthali, Nyamwaya (author), Lie, Rico (author), Van Lammeren, Ron (author), Van Paassen, Annemarie (author), Leeuwis, Cees (author), and Asare, Richard (author)
Format:
Journal article
Publication Date:
2021-06-12
Published:
South Africa: University of Witwatersrand
Location:
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 204 Document Number: D12435
37 pages., Information and communication technologies (ICTs), specifically those that are digital and interactive, present opportunities for enhanced intermediation between actors in Ghana’s agricultural extension system. To understand these opportunities, this study investigates the capabilities of ICTs in support of seven forms of intermediation in the context of agricultural extension: disseminating (information), retrieving (information), harvesting (information), matching (actors to services), networking (among actors), coordinating (actors), and co-creating (among actors). The study identifies the types of ICTs currently functioning in Ghana’s agricultural system, and applies a Delphi-inspired research design to determine the consensus and dissensus of researchers, scientists, and practitioners about the potential of these ICTs to support each of the seven intermediation capabilities. The findings reveal that experts reached consensus that interactive voice response (IVR) technologies currently have the highest potential to support disseminating, retrieving, harvesting, and matching. Meanwhile, social media messaging (SMM) technologies are currently seen as highly capable of supporting coordinating and, to a lesser extent, co-creating, but no consensus is reached on the potential of any of the technologies to support networking.
25 pages, The consumption of food production demand for quality of food and the environmental impact of agriculture have led to utilize the information and communication technology in the agricultural sector. The Internet of Things (IoT) has become a contemporary technology, which is evolving quickly in recent years and brings many benefits with it to modernize the agriculture. The scientific groups and research institutes are working to deliver clarifications and solutions for the use of IoT to address various aspects of agriculture. The focal point of this research is to present an SLR (Systematic Literature
Review) by collecting the valid and innovative research on IoT in agriculture which has been done during 2019 at School of System and Technology, University of Management and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan. This SLR has been conducted through research articles which were published in the prestigious venues from 2006 to 2019. In order to conduct this SLR concerned studies have been clustered into different classifications: type of the concerned research, empirical type, technological solutions for agriculture like monitoring, control, prediction, logistics and their sub-domains. Moreover, an IoT based framework of smart agriculture has been presented that indicate the current solutions of agricultural problems. The selected 80 research papers have been classified as per defined criteria. The findings of this research have been discussed in
detail and summarize the practice of IoT in agriculture.
17 pages, The creation of commercialization opportunities for smallholder farmers has taken primacy on the development agenda of many developing countries. Invariably, most of the smallholders are less productive than commercial farmers and continue to lag in commercialization. Apart from the various multifaceted challenges which smallholder farmers face, limited access to extension services stands as the underlying constraint to their sustainability. Across Africa and Asia, public extension is envisioned as a fundamental part of the process of transforming smallholder farmers because it is their major source of agricultural information. Extension continues to be deployed using different approaches which are evolving. For many decades, various authors have reported the importance of the approaches that effectively revitalize extension systems and have attempted to fit them into various typologies. However, there is a widespread concern over the inefficiency of these extension approaches in driving the sustainability of smallholder farming agenda. Further, most of the approaches that attempted to revolutionize extension have been developed and brought into the field in rapid succession, but with little or no impact at the farmer level. This paper explores the theory and application of agricultural extension approaches and argues the potential of transforming them using digital technologies. The adoption of information and communication technologies (ICTs) such as mobile phones and the internet which are envisaged to revolutionize existing extension systems and contribute towards the sustainability of smallholder farming systems is recommended
