Do ICT based extension services improve technology adoption and welfare? Empirical evidence from Ghana

Mohammed, Sadick; Abdulai, Awudu

doi:10.1080/00036846.2021.1998334

Cited by 11 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…The p-value for the null hypothesis shows that ρ md is significantly different from zero (at 1% level), indicating that farmers' extension participation and inoculant adoption decisions may be correlated due to unobserved heterogeneities. However, the sign for ρ md is negative, suggesting that farmers are likely to substitute adoption of new technologies (such as the inoculant) with knowledge acquisition from extension participation (Huth and Allee, 2002;Mohammed and Abdulai, 2022b). This observation is intuitive, because both extension services and adoption of improved technologies tend to enhance farmers' production efficiency (Abdulai and Huffman, 2000;Kumbhakar and Tsionas, 2009;Triebs and Kumbhakar, 2018).…”

Section: First-stage Bivariate Probit Estimatesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impacts of extension dissemination and technology adoption on farmers' efficiency and welfare in Ghana: Evidence from legume inoculant technology

Mohammed

Abdulai

2022

Front. Sustain. Food Syst.

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Examining the welfare impact of agricultural development interventions that incorporate diffusion of improved production technologies to farmers within extension delivery programs can be very challenging, because of the difficulty in disentangling the individual impacts of the production technology and the extension delivery program. Using recent farm level survey data from extension dissemination program of legume inoculant technology of 600 farmers in Ghana, we employ a recent methodological approach to investigate, simultaneously, the impact of the inoculant technology adoption and the extension program participation on farmers' productivity, efficiency and welfare. We decompose each of these impact measures into subcomponents whose causal paths can be traced to both the adoption of the production technology and the extension delivery program. We find that, in terms of yields and net revenue, direct contribution of improved technology adoption alone is 34 and 64%, respectively, and 35 and 66% indirectly due to improved farmer efficiency, leading to 36 and 74% improvement in farmers' welfare, respectively. On the other hand, direct contribution of extension delivery program participation alone is 66 and 36%, respectively, with 66 and 34% indirectly due to improved farmer efficiency, resulting in 64 and 26% improvement in farmers' welfare, respectively. Based on the findings, we recommend that policymakers should invest in research and development to produce yield enhancing agricultural technologies suitable for poor and degraded soil conditions in developing countries which can contribute immensely to poverty and food insecurity reduction. The development of new agricultural technologies must be pursued with vigorous provision of extension services to farmers to be able to exploit the full potentials of the new technologies.

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Section: First-stage Bivariate Probit Estimatesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impacts of extension dissemination and technology adoption on farmers' efficiency and welfare in Ghana: Evidence from legume inoculant technology

Mohammed

Abdulai

2022

Front. Sustain. Food Syst.

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“…, 2020; Ma et al. , 2020), promote the adoption of sustainable production techniques (Mohammed and Abdulai, 2021) and help reduce the abandonment of farmland by farmers (Deng et al. , 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Accessing the effect of smartphone agricultural applications on land transfer: evidence from Sichuan province in China

Yu,

Abdulai,

2024

CAER

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PurposeThis study aims to examine farmers' decision to use smartphone agricultural applications (SAAs) and how SAAs adoption impact their land transfer behaviors in terms of the current land transfer-in area (LTA) and the future willingness to renew land transfer-in after it expires (WTR).Design/methodology/approachThis study provides empirical evidence on the relationship between farmers' use of SAAs and land transfer choice, using a field survey data of 752 rural farm households in 2020 from Sichuan province of China. The endogenous switching models are employed to address potential self-selection bias associated with voluntary SAAs use and to quantitatively examine the impacts of SAAs use on land transfer choice.FindingsThe empirical results reveal that SAAs significantly improves the probability of transfer-in of more land by 39.10%. We find SAAs use has heterogeneous impacts on land transfer-in choice in the groups of agricultural technology, extension service, marketing and credit. Besides, we also find that SAAs use exerts highly positive and significant impact on farmers with less land area transfer-in. Moreover, SAAs can increase the probability of farmers' willingness to renew the land transfer-in by 30%.Originality/valueTo the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to explore the quantitative relationship between the use of SAAs and farm households' land transfer choice. The findings of this work can provide policy-related insights to help government promote the development of digital applications in the agricultural sector.

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“…The low technology adoption among farmers has been identified as one of the root causes of low productivity and high poverty incidence among smallholder farmers (Takahashi et al 2020;Abdulai and Huffman 2014). Weak and ineffective extension services due to resource constraints to employ and equip extension agents to serve the needs of the widely dispersed smallholder farmers who constitute majority of the farming population in many developing countries, accounts for the inadequate information (Mohammed and Abdulai 2022;Blum and Szonyi 2011).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do Egocentric information networks influence technical efficiency of farmers? Empirical evidence from Ghana

Mohammed

Abdulai

2022

J Prod Anal

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We investigate the impact of farmers’ egocentric information network on technical efficiency and its distribution in the network, using observational data of 600 farmers from northern Ghana. We exploit community detection algorithms to endogenously identify homogeneous network communities with known structures to account for spatial heterogeneity, in a spatial stochastic frontier model that controls for social selection bias. The empirical results reveal that at the global network level, farmers’ technical efficiency strongly correlate with that of farmers in their egocentric networks. Our findings also show that farmers who are technically less efficient tend to depend on the more efficient farmers in their networks to improve efficiency. We further find that estimating spatial dependence of technical efficiency without accounting for spatial heterogeneity can lead to underestimation of technical efficiency of high (efficiency score >0.6) performing farmers, while overestimating that of medium (efficiency scores between 0.36–0.5) and low (efficiency scores between 0.1–0.35) performing farmers. The findings suggest that identifying central farmers in egocentric networks and improving their technical knowledge in a farmer-to-farmer extension organization, can contribute to improving the productivity of many farmers.

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Do ICT based extension services improve technology adoption and welfare? Empirical evidence from Ghana

Cited by 11 publications

References 37 publications

Impacts of extension dissemination and technology adoption on farmers' efficiency and welfare in Ghana: Evidence from legume inoculant technology

Impacts of extension dissemination and technology adoption on farmers' efficiency and welfare in Ghana: Evidence from legume inoculant technology

Accessing the effect of smartphone agricultural applications on land transfer: evidence from Sichuan province in China

Do Egocentric information networks influence technical efficiency of farmers? Empirical evidence from Ghana

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