The provision of information through mobile phone-enabled agricultural information services (m-Agri services) has the potential to revolutionise agriculture and significantly improve smallholder farmers’ livelihoods in Africa. Globally, the benefits of m-Agri services include facilitating farmers’ access to financial services and sourcing agricultural information about input use, practices, and market prices. There are very few published literature sources that focus on the potential benefits of m-Agri services in Africa and none of which explore their sustainability. This study, therefore, explores the evolution, provision, and sustainability of these m-Agri services in Africa. An overview of the current landscape of m-Agri services in Africa is provided and this illustrates how varied these services are in design, content, and quality. Key findings from the exploratory literature review reveal that services are highly likely to fail to achieve their intended purpose or be abandoned when implementers ignore the literacy, skills, culture, and demands of the target users. This study recommends that, to enhance the sustainability of m-Agri services, the implementers need to design the services with the users involved, carefully analyse, and understand the target environment, and design for scale and a long-term purpose. While privacy and security of users need to be ensured, the reuse or improvement of existing initiatives should be explored, and projects need to be data-driven and maintained as open source. Thus, the study concludes that policymakers can support the long-term benefit of m-Agri services by ensuring favourable policies for both users and implementers.

Agro-ecological farming approaches sustain food production with zero or reduced dependence on agro-chemicals. This study investigated the impact of public agricultural extension activities in enhancing the transition to agro-ecological approaches, in particular organic farming, in south-eastern Nigeria. Data were collected from thirty farmers and twenty extension personnel using in-depth interviews. The respondents were selected using a purposeful random sampling technique. The results show that extension and advisory activities are influenced by current agricultural policy. Extension personnel currently focus almost exclusively on intensive agricultural practices because of the agricultural transformation agenda which surprisingly ignores the principles of organic farming. Factors such as policy, social, environmental, research and extension management were observed to impede organic farming transition. It is concluded that there is need for a clearly enunciated organic agricultural policy that supports farmers, organic agricultural research and information dissemination. A participatory approach in policy formulation and information dissemination that incorporates farmers' traditional knowledge with capacity to strengthen the agricultural information dissemination structure is recommended to improve agro-ecological transition.

This study explored smallholder farmers' perception on the uptake of agricultural innovations in Kuje area council of Abuja, FCT. The study was carried out in three communities in Kuje namely, Chukuku, Chibiri and Dafara. The study was guided basically by four objectives which were all analysed using descriptive statistics. The communities in which the study was carried out were sampled purposively and 80 smallholder farmers were in total selected from the three communities. Well structured questionnaires were used to collect primary data. However, assistance was given to a few farmers who weren't literate enough to read the contents of the questionnaire. Findings from the study were presented in frequency and percentage distribution tables. Results from the study revealed that smallholder farmers had varying perceptions about agricultural innovations ranging from good, bad to indifferent. Most of the smallholder farmers in the study area believed that agricultural innovations are good, they however insisted that agricultural innovations were sometimes difficult to understand and also there were issues with poor follow up by the introducer of innovations (mostly agricultural extension agent). Based on this, it was recommended that: agricultural innovations should meet the needs of farmers and should be at their level of understanding. Also, introducers of agricultural innovations should endeavour to improve on their follow up activities to ensure ultimate uptake of innovation by farmers.

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