AFRICAN agriculture and food systems are witnessing an increase in multiple sources of information.
That implies that it is no longer enough for extension officers to teach farmers how to grow crops or rear livestock because farmers can easily get such advice from diverse sources.
Governments must rethink the role of agricultural extension services in a rapidly changing climate, where leveraging on knowledge is becoming more important than owning natural resources.
For agriculture-based economies, gone are the days when departments in one ministry hoped to make a difference while operating as stand-alone units in ways that hinder knowledge sharing and reinforce knowledge silos.
In most African countries, departments that have continued to function in isolation include crops, livestock, training, research, veterinary services, agricultural engineering, agricultural colleges and many others under one ministry.
By operating in silos, there are often no clear knowledge sharing pathways between several departments under a single ministry.
Breaking silos and enhancing knowledge exchange
In a knowledge economy, the re-imagined agricultural extension services should be responsible for breaking silos between departments to enhance knowledge exchange between departments.
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For instance, it is critical to harmonise relationships between the training department and other departments like crops and livestock as well as identifying training needs for different departments or better still, mainstreaming training issues within all departments.
The new knowledge-driven extension services should also address lack of synchronisation between donor-driven projects and government projects, which is a big challenge in most African countries.
Donor-driven projects have hijacked government extension services to the extent that the day-to-day role of extension officers has become unclear as these officers run around with donor projects instead of focusing on their core business.
As if that is not enough, donor-funded siloed projects championed by development organisations are confusing farmers.
In addition, private contractors also bring their interventions selectively.
When government officers follow non-governmental organisation (NGO) activities, the result is selective implementation of projects, which makes it difficult to plan and harmonise government interventions.
What also tends to be unclear is the entry point for economic actors who want to introduce new innovations.
For instance, should new innovations be introduced through the minister, permanent secretary, chief directors or provincial officers?
Besides wasting resources, introducing new initiatives intended for grassroots farmers, through different government offices, ends up excluding project initiators.
New interventions are also failing to find space within colonial procurement approaches and processes.
From extension services to knowledge consolidation and management
To increase the availability of relevant information and knowledge in real time, the extension services department should be re-designed and given a new mandate that focuses on consolidating information and knowledge from all other departments.
Its main roles should include identifying training needs, knowledge gaps and facilitating the identification of capacity building providers.
It should also be interested in how data is timeously generated for processing so that it informs interventions at national level as well as policy reviews.
Such data should guide timely preparedness and early warnings whose absence are often a huge threat to food security.
When properly leveraged, the data can show how to handle bumper harvests as well as controlling market prices through supporting temporary warehousing facilities so that farmers earn better income.
Consolidating and prioritising agricultural and food security needs is a missing gap in most African countries as seen through a mismatch between food losses and food imports.
When there is no institution co-ordinating the activities of development interventions participating in agriculture and rural development, farmers end up forming their own commodity associations with no involvement of government departments like extension services.
As very important supply chain actors, agricultural dealers also need an institution that can co-ordinate and link them with other local economic actors.
Understanding and harmonising the role of agricultural dealers can enable extension services to monitor and control inputs coming through different organisations.
In the absence of co-ordination, contracting companies can easily sideline agricultural dealers and government interventions and cause more confusion among farming communities in ways that undermine local industries and sustainable models that are critical when government input schemes and NGOs are no longer available. In most cases, too much concentration on production means no one is capturing data on whether farmers are making a profit or not.
Yet it is critical to support and position smallholder farmers through profiling and tracking their collective community business.
The more the Agriculture ministry has control over data, the more it understands the agricultural and food systems landscape.
It should be interested to know middlemen who are coming to buy commodities in particular districts and where they are taking those commodities.
Information on remittances that are directly supporting agriculture in communities and districts is also critical for the Agriculture ministry if collected by extension services.
- Charles Dhewa is a proactive knowledge broker and management specialist
