Assessing the effectiveness of Agriculture e-extension and advisory

services for smallholder farmers in Tanzania. A case of Five villages in

Kilosa District.

Valentin Ngorisa Olyang’iri1

Abstract:
Tanzania like many other countries in the global south still considers agriculture as the
backbone of its economy despite the growth of other sectors like tourism, information
technology, and mining among others. This is because the sector employs 58 percent of
the population, the majority of them being smallholder farmers in the rural area and the
sector contributes to about 28.2 percent of the GDP. Capitalizing on the sector because
of its critical importance the government enacted policies, laws and created programs
geared to capture sectoral contributions in terms of revenues and increase of produces
for food security reasons. To fully achieve policy, legal, and programs thirst, the
government has been emphasizing the provision of quality and efficient agriculture
extension services and of recently embarked on e-extension services by taking
advantage of technological advancement and acceptance in the rural and urban setting
and the role of the private sector. Emphasis on the use of ICT came at the expense of
failed conventional agricultural extension services. While this position by the
government holds the truth, we argue that, without adequate involvement of
smallholder farmers (men and women) through their groups and networks at the local
level to decide the type/form of agriculture e-extension services and nature of actors to
be involved, the overemphasized e-services will likely not achieve any notable results in
favor of SHF. Drawing on results from a program implemented by a Network of Groups
of Smallholder Farmers based in Morogoro specifically five villages in Kilosa district, we
examine agricultural extension services provision in the area by looking into two
aspects of extension services that’s the receiving and provider ends. We outline
challenges affecting extension services provision in the country including inadequate
extension officers, lack of strong research extension-farmers linkages, poor living and
working conditions, and poor communication between service providers and receivers.
Whereas paying attention to the challenges highlighted, the paper, however, presents
how e-extension services is also a class issue requiring a class lens analysis.

Keywords: Agriculture, e-extension, smallholder farmers, ICT, NGOs

1
Is Research Associate with PAICODEO a pastoralist NGO based in Morogoro Tanzaniania. He holds BA in
Geography and Environmental Studies from University of Dar es Salaam and MSc. Environmental
Governance from the University of Manchester, UK. He previously worked for MVIWATA (a National
Network of Groups of Smallholder farmers in Tanzania and Land Rights Research and Resources
Institute/HAKIARDHI. He can be reached at ngorisajr@gmail.com P.O.Box 894 Morogoro