REFORMING AGRICULTURAL EXTENSION TO BUILD RESILIENT AND SUSTAINABLE FOOD SYSTEMS: INSIGHTS FROM NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL CONSULTATIONS
Food systems around the world face growing challenges. They must be transformed to sustainably feed a growing global population and made more resilient to shocks from extreme weather to conflict. Efforts on those fronts are increasingly interlinked—and depend on well-targeted local interventions.
Those in turn will depend on effective national extension services operating on the ground with farmers. Unfortunately, rural extension services face an array of problems that limit their potential role in food systems transformation. They face reduced budgets and have generally weak technical and functional capacities, soft skills, and poor coordination. They lack strong ties to research sources and institutions (Davis et al, 2020; Jayne et al, 2023; Ledermann et al, 2024; FAO, 2021; Dhital, 2017). Many national FAS policies and documents don’t even explicitly mention extension services.
A recent series of national consultations and international events organized by IFPRI and its collaborators including the Institute for Integrated Development Studies (IIDS) (Nepal), Tamil Nadu Agricultural University (India), the U.S. government, the Global Methane Hub, and Abt Global, explored these challenges and ways to address them. The consultations brought together policymakers, practitioners, and researchers in Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Malawi, and Nepal from 2022 to 2024 with the overall aim of promoting south-south learning.
Collectively the consultations addressed a major question: How can food and agriculture systems (FAS) build resilience to address growing vulnerabilities, risks, and threats, and ensure sustainable food and nutrition security for current and future generations? A key focus was the need to reorient existing research and extension systems so as to contribute to more resilient and sustainable FAS transformation.
Local and Indigenous knowledge are essential elements in increasing sustainable production and promoting ecosystem resilience (UNFSSS), and extension systems are ideally positioned to focus on these areas. Based on the consultations, this post outlines specific issues, challenges, and opportunities for reforming extension systems that can play an accelerated role in FAS transformation in the Global South.
A multidisciplinary approach is key for successful extension delivery in the context of building resilience
Extension systems can play a significant role in connecting FAS-related goals to action on the ground. But currently, few are embracing this task.
While they have received significant public funding over the long term (despite recent declines), extension systems have made only limited strategic use of these resources, focusing largely on their traditional role of providing seasonal services and advice to farmers. Meanwhile, the private sector and not-for-profit organizations have become more involved in providing extension services—yet their focus remains on specific value chains and input delivery. They pay much less attention to addressing cross-cutting issues such as inclusiveness and extension access for vulnerable groups in remote locations. In addition, private extension efforts lack the scale and capacity to address the growing and evolving resilience-related challenges in food systems.
To address this gap and push existing extension systems to address broad food system challenges, governments should take a multidisciplinary and multisectoral approach. Sectoral ministries overseeing food, agriculture, forestry, irrigation, water resources, livestock, and meteorology, as well as institutions within the national agricultural research and innovation system, should work with the extension system and on the ground to support farmers and other value chain actors. While initial efforts in this area have shown promise, these should be ramped up and applied as quickly as possible to achieve the goals of food systems transformation (see, for example, these IFPRI discussion papers on Myanmar and Afghanistan). Such efforts will also require innovative financial mechanisms to support continued interventions.
Facilitate partnerships to enhance the scale and impact of extension systems
Another source of leverage to improve extension systems is international partnerships, which can bring policy and strategy advocacy, capacity development, and funding interventions to the table. These include partnerships between multilateral and bilateral organizations and regional organizations such as the African Union, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) in South Asia, for example.
Multilateral financial institutions can support the development of extension systems through programs targeting specific value chains. The private sector can mobilize investments for specific actions such as food loss and waste management in agriculture value chains. Public-private partnerships promote innovative practices for smallholders such as regenerative agriculture and nature-based solutions and strengthen partnerships at the local level to provide technical knowledge and ensure local government accountability.
Expand extension systems’ engagement with the private sector to actively support farmers
Building resilient and sustainable FAS is increasingly driven by private sector innovations, yet public extension systems do not effectively engage with this process.
One example is linking farmers to global carbon markets. Private investors have developed technologies that measure soil carbon using artificial intelligence and satellite technologies; they often work with farmer groups to help them adopt improved carbon sequestration practices. Such interventions help to increase smallholder productivity while improving the resilience of production systems. Income from climate-smart cropping practices can also help farmers earn carbon credits sold on international carbon markets.
Yet extension services typically play no part in such efforts. Collaboration between public extension systems and private carbon technology and verification companies is crucial to ensure that farmers adopt climate-friendly practices and participate in carbon markets.
Such collaboration will mean increasing both the quantity and quality of extension services. This also requires new models of combining policy, institutional, governance, capacity development, and investment mechanisms that are transparent and mutually accountable (for example, this extension reform effort in Nigeria).
Provide extension systems with sufficient resources for action on the ground
Resources for local public extension systems have been dwindling in many developing countries for years. Yet these are the countries most vulnerable to food insecurity and hunger and are often affected by climate-driven extreme weather and other disasters.
Extension officers in the field often operate with few resources. They need consistent, robust funding to ensure that any relevant and available research, technology, and information reach farmers promptly.
Governments should make extension services a funding priority, particularly in the context of encouraging resilient agriculture practices.
Working with national policymakers to prioritize extension funding in agriculture ministries is an important first step. Ministries should provide agents with basic work incentives including transportation and safety allowances, competitive salaries, and opportunities for career growth. Another key priority should be strengthening digital extension connectivity to reach out to distant geographic regions.
Ensure accountability to farmers
Currently, most public extension systems are poorly equipped to hold their own agents accountable to farmers. Strengthening accountability is key to pursuing FAS transformation and building resilience.
Extension services should operate through an effective governance structure involving scoping, designing, planning, and implementation of services. In this context, a monitoring and evaluation (M&E) system is crucial for regular reporting of data, case studies, analysis, and best practices. To ensure accountability, farmers and farmer organizations should be actively involved in the M&E process—helping to identify gaps, document feedback, and evaluate progress. This approach should eventually result in more demand-driven extension services.
Digital extension services and use of AI tools can empower farmers
Digital extension—in the form of virtual extension services and mobile apps—can provide information to farmers on a range of topics including crop management, animal husbandry, and marketing and pricing. AI-based solutions can help boost the cost-effectiveness and delivery of existing extension systems. For example, Digital Green developed an AI-powered assistant that helps extension agents view upcoming tasks, log feedback and farmer queries, and retrieve advisory information to answer those queries. Digital Green is currently developing a chatbot app to answer queries about agriculture and translate scientific and technical content into advisories.
Digital extension applications can also help farmers access information on market prices to reduce risk in farming, protect their enterprises from natural disasters, and save investments. Finally, digital extension services can be a source of knowledge on healthy diets and nutrition education that can build human infrastructure (Noma and Babu, 2024).
Support building resilience to ensure the agriculture sector targets are met
National agriculture strategies should focus on resilient and sustainable management of natural resources and food loss and waste, and buttressing the extension role in those efforts. Building resilience in the farming sector requires three-way communication among farmers, extension professionals, and researchers.
Given the agriculture sector’s vulnerability to water scarcity and soil erosion, governments should promote interventions such as resilient crop varieties, livestock management, organic fertilizers, and efficient water management techniques such as rainwater harvesting and drip irrigation.
In the rice sector, for example, local administration and extension systems have an opportunity to train farmers on efficient water use. Extension system support to promote early warning systems can help farmers make timely and evidence-based decisions on disaster preparedness and risk management. For this purpose, the extension system should be closely integrated with local early warning systems. Extension agents should receive training on those systems and on how to share key information with farmers. At the same time, agents can also help in collecting relevant farm-level data for generating early warning indicators.
Upgrading technical skills of extension personnel to meet resilience and sustainability challenges
Across the consultations, there was consensus on the need for broad reorientation and reorganization of extension systems to meet sustainability and resilience-building goals. A key element of such reforms should be improving extension workers’ technical knowledge. Policymakers should consider regular training for extension personnel on sustainability and building resilience.
More broadly, countries should aim to cultivate a new generation of extension professionals who go beyond the traditional production and technology-oriented approach and can develop strategic innovations focused on sustainable FAS transformation. This will require reevaluating university extension curricula across the Global South to update them with current concepts and approaches.
Conclusion
Transforming food and agriculture systems in the 21st century will depend to a large degree on extension services. Yet extension models are outdated and underfunded. In many countries, extension services are not able to meet the challenges identified above. Thus, reforming and funding extension systems to address this new set of challenges is essential, and IFPRI-led consultations were clear on the broad outlines for change. Going forward, countries seeking to build on those recommendations for resilient and sustainable food system transformation should focus on developing specific policies and strategies to address their unique local conditions and contexts.
Suresh Chandra Babu is a Senior Research Fellow with IFPRI’s Development Strategies and Governance (DSG) Unit and Head of Capacity Strengthening; Nandita Srivastava is a DSG Research Analyst. Opinions are the authors’.
This work was supported by the U.S. government and Global Methane Hub.
This blog was first posted here.
