The Grameen Foundation’s Community Knowledge Worker Program

Daniel McCole, Ph.D., MBA | Department of Community Sustainability at Michigan State University

Introduction

The important role of agricultural extension and advisory services in building capacity among farmers in the developing world is widely known. Like in many places, access to and diffusion of agricultural knowledge throughout Uganda (a country where 19.3 million people are members of farming households) is critical to improving food security, reducing poverty, and developing sustainable agriculture.

As a landlocked country, Uganda produces almost all of its own food, and most of its agricultural production is for domestic use. The main export crops of coffee, tea, cotton, and sugar together comprise less than 8% of cropped areas (Gollin & Rogerson, 2010). Rural households in Uganda are very poor, with a poverty rate (34.2%) almost triple that of urban households (Uganda Bureau of Statistics, 2006).    

Most of Uganda’s agricultural production occurs on smallholder plots (Uganda Bureau of Statistics, 2003) on which the majority of farmers implement traditional practices that provide low yields. According to a USAID report on Uganda’s rural economy (2008), agronomic best practices such as mulching, proper plant spacing, weeding, and pruning are not widely used in Uganda, and intercropping for higher yields is not properly understood. The report concludes that the “inability to manage pests and disease, together with poor post-harvest handling, often result in substantial crop losses” (p. 12). The lack of these improved farming practices to manage production risk creates a precarious situation for the millions of farmers involved in agriculture in Uganda. Better diffusion of agricultural knowledge in the country would likely lead to improved yields and improving food security, reducing poverty. 

As with many developing countries, agricultural extension and advisory services (EAS) have not traditionally reached a large portion of the farming population in Uganda. Poor transportation infrastructure makes travel to remote villages difficult for extension agents, and many government extension agencies face organizational challenges that limit their reach. Since 2001, Uganda’s agricultural extension and advisory services have been implemented by the National Agricultural Advisory Services (NAADS), but the ratio of farmers-to-extension workers in Uganda is reported to be over 3,000 to one, an inadequate ratio to fully meet the country’s need for extension and advisory services.  (Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries, 2009). According to the 2008 National Service Delivery Survey, for example, only 14 percent of all farming households had been visited by an extension worker in the 12 months preceding the survey (Uganda Bureau of Statistics, 2008). 

In addition to the poor coverage of extension agents, knowledge diffusion is further hampered by a high rate of illiteracy amongst Ugandan farmers, which makes the use of written material a less effective option for EAS. The illiteracy rate among Ugandan farmers has been reported to be as low as 31% (Uganda Census of Agriculture, 2011) and as high as greater than 50% (Naluwairo, 2011). Because of the challenges presented by the high illiteracy rate, and without the resources for a large network of field-based extension agents, EAS providers in the developing world have looked to such options as mobile phones to assist with agricultural knowledge diffusion.  Several programs involving the use of mobile phones in agricultural extension have been implemented throughout the world, however, academic studies on these types of programs have yet to show strong impact from these programs.

The Community Knowledge Worker (CKW) Program

The Grameen Foundation’s Community Knowledge Worker (CKW) program, is an agricultural EAS program in Uganda that uses a unique extension model to address many of the challenges and weaknesses of other EAS programs, including issues of illiteracy; limited resources for government EAS provision; poor communication between farmers, advisors, and researchers; and lack of hands-on assistance and interpretation of agricultural information sent via ITCs.

Traditional agricultural extension uses a relatively small number of highly trained extension agents who try to reach a large number of farmers. In developing countries with poor infrastructure, organizational challenges within government extension agencies, and high rates of poverty and illiteracy, this traditional model often does not have the needed reach and impact. The CKW program reverses the traditional extension model by using a large number of lightly trained, but respected, local farmers (CKWs) to access up-to-date and actionable agricultural information via a smartphone. These CKWs then act as liaisons between their community members and the agricultural information in the database. The database includes: agricultural best practices, weather forecasts, market information and prices, an input supplier directory, and detailed farming information on a wide variety of crops and animals.

Although the use of mobile phones is essential to the CKW program, it is secondary to the CKWs themselves, who use the phones to search for needed agricultural information in the database and interpret the information for their neighbors. This immediate access to information allows for the recruitment of less educated “extension agents,” and because CKWs are vested members of the communities they serve, they often take an active role in diagnosing their neighbors’ farming challenges and encouraging the adoption of recommended farming practices.

Most EAS programs that have used mobile phones to disseminate agricultural information rely on all farmers having access to a mobile phone. While the penetration of mobile phones in rural areas is high, it is not complete. Moreover, farmers receiving agricultural information directly may not accurately understand what is being communicated. The Grameen program addresses both of these problems, as only the CKW needs to have access to the smartphone, and they can provide their neighbors with hands-on interpretation of the information accessed from the database.

The use of community members allows the program to reach the most-rural “last kilometer” villages and allows for important agricultural information to reach a larger number of farmers at a relatively low cost. Moreover, the operational costs of the program stay relatively constant even in the most remote villages. Traditional extension models have higher financial and opportunity costs for the hardest to reach areas. The Grameen Foundation estimates their cost-per-farmer-reached to be 15 times less expensive than the face-to-face farmer field school programs run by one of their partner organizations (Paavo-Krepp, 2012).

Another advantage of the CKW program over other mobile phone EAS programs is a two-way exchange of information between farmers and development organizations. The CKW smartphones include software for collecting data from farmers. When the CKWs register a new farmer, they collect basic information, including the size of their plots, their top crops and animals, their primary EAS topics of interest, and poverty indicators. This information facilitates monitoring the program. Moreover, when CKWs encounter local remedies (e.g., to common plant diseases), they can submit this information to Grameen. After a vetting process by agricultural researchers, this local knowledge is added to the CKW database for wider distribution.

One of the most challenging obstacles to extension initiatives is sustaining programs over time, especially after initial grant funds have been exhausted.  When initially developing the CKW program, the Grameen Foundation had sustainability in mind.  By training CKWs on such topics as survey gathering procedures and survey ethics and requiring ongoing survey gathering as part of the CKWs responsibilities, the Grameen Foundation, in addition to having a growing network of extension workers, has also developed a network of enumerators.  Grameen uses this network, equipped with its custom-developed mobile survey applications to gather data for research, extension, commercial, and development organizations on a variety of topics, including agricultural practices, livestock numbers, family health, poverty, and education.  This service allows client organizations to gather important data more effectively and cheaper that they could on their own.  Also because the CKWs are often asked to collect data in their communities, they have local knowledge of the survey area and can therefore collect the data more efficiently, something important in a country such as Uganda where finding homes in rural areas can be difficult.  Moreover, survey respondents are reportedly less suspicious of enumerators who are from their community.

The revenues that Grameen earns through its data collection services help to supplement the operational costs associated with the CKW program.  As of June of 2013, less than four years after it started, the CKW program was 57% sustainable.  In addition to helping the program remain sustainable, the opportunity to collect surveys represents yet another possible source of income for CKWs, as they are paid for their work collecting data outside the requirements of their regular duties.

Grameen has used the extensive amount of information it has collected to conduct data mining studies which suggest the program is working the way they intended, and a recent quasi-experimental study showed increases in farmer knowledge, access to extension services, knowledge of market prices and obtained price for some crops.  Currently a three year randomized control study is being conducted by MEAS (Modernizing Extension and Advisory Services) to examine whether the program is creating the impacts for which it was designed; most importantly increasing food security and reducing poverty.

Conclusions

Although studies on mobile phone-based agricultural programs have yet to show strong impact, many EAS providers recognize that mobile phones offer significant potential for inexpensive knowledge diffusion (Aker, 2010; Jensen, 2007).  This is especially so with the advent of smartphones, which dramatically enhance the possibilities for using mobile phones.  Most EAS providers think that mobile phones can eventually be used to successfully provide extension services, but not until barriers to their effectiveness are overcome.  A review of EAS programs that have incorporated mobile phones reveals three possible reasons for the weak reported impact.  First, most mobile phone interventions rely on one-way, top down communication, which has been identified as a weakness of radio-based EAS programs. Second, many of the EAS programs that use mobile phones include text messages, which are appropriate only for literate farmers. Third, EAS programs that use mobile phones attempt to directly reach the farmer or someone in the farmer’s household, rather than reaching someone who can help the farmer interpret the information from the mobile phone. An agricultural EAS program that addresses these three potential weaknesses might more effectively incorporate mobile phones into agricultural knowledge diffusion.

The Grameen Foundation’s CKW program seems to be an innovative approach to inexpensively supplementing existing EAS efforts in a way that reaches the most rural villages and the farmers who are in the greatest need of EAS.  The program uses the latest information communications technology (smart phones), but advances beyond most mobile phone programs in that the technology is not the main focus of the intervention, but rather is merely a tool (albeit a vital one) used by a high number of lightly trained extension workers.  By doing so, the program addresses some of the greatest challenges facing traditional extension programs.  Ongoing evaluation of this program by MEAS and other organizations will help Grameen refine this innovative model, and inform its application to other EAS settings.                                                                               

References

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Jensen, R. (2007). The digital provide: Information (technology), market performance and welfare in the south Indian fisheries sector. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 122(3), 879-924. doi:10.1162/qjec.122.3.879

Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industry, and Fisheries (2009). Policy Position of the Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries on the Proposed Conversion of Public Extension Staff in Local Governments to National Agricultural Advisory Services. Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industry, and Fisheries. Entebbe, Uganda.

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