An Assessment Of Malawian Smallholder Farmers’ Readiness To Start Using Fee-Paying Digital Media For Extension Service Delivery

Abstract

Digital media for extension service delivery are currently being utilized by smallholder farmers in Malawi, at subsidized rates. Digital extension service delivery in Malawi has for a long time, been championed using subsidies from the donor agencies such as the Government of Flanders, the World Food Programme (WFP), the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and GIZ. Currently, three institutions in Malawi are running the farmers’ call centre: Farm Radio Trust (FRT), the Agriculture Commodity Exchange (ACE), and Airtel Malawi. Malawi’s annual budget, however, depends on foreign aid, which accounts for around a quarter of the annual income. Since donor support has not been very steady, funding for extension service delivery in Malawi continues to dwindle, as evidenced by the annual budgetary allocation vote no. 190 for the Ministry of Agriculture, which has been getting smaller every financial year. The dwindling funding for the extension service delivery in Malawi is a signal that indicates the need to start seeking funding from other sources. This study, therefore, was motivated by this general donor fatigue which could hit the extension service delivery in Malawi, specifically digital extension. A sample of 782 smallholder farmers that were already exposed to digital media for extension service in Nkanakhothi Extension Planning Area (EPA) in Kasungu district in central Malawi, and Malosa EPA in Zomba district in southern Malawi, participated in this quantitative study by completing a closed-ended questionnaire. The descriptive method of data analysis was conducted, using IBM® SPSS® statistics version 22. Farmers reported higher levels of awareness about the existence, usage and knowledge about the benefits they got from using the digital media for extension services, their capacity to access agricultural content using the digital platforms, and their readiness to start using fee paying digital media for extension services. A Pearson correlation coefficient was computed to assess the linear relationship among the variables of awareness, knowledge and capacity, with readiness as a dependent variable in the study, and it found that there was a significant positive correlation between the capacity of the farmers and their readiness to start accessing agricultural content using fee-paying digital media. The main findings of the study, therefore, were that farmers in Malawi were ready for the introduction of fee-paying digital extension services, with those having enough financial capacity indicating more readiness and willingness than those with less capacity.