6533b825fe1ef96bd1281b57

RESEARCH PRODUCT

The impact of agricultural extension services

subject

description

Ouvrage disponible sur : http://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/999271468770338179/pdf/multi-page.pdf; International audience; This paper provides a review of the literature on the effectiveness of agricultural extension services worldwide. It shows that evaluators of the internal effectiveness of extension services are generally critical ; they claim that extension services have poor performance, reach only a small proportion of farmers (those who are better off), have wrong objectives, and are of little help to the agricultural sector as a whole. The author argues that this diagnosis may be excessive, that evaluators often have irrelevant evaluation criteria, and that historically the situation has substantially improved. Evaluators of external efficiency, mainly economists, show much more positive results. Those who use aggregate data find highsocial rates of return to investment in extension services and high correlations between extension services and agricultural productivity, but the methods used tend to overestimate the specific impact of extension services. Those who use farm-level data obtain mixed results, about half with significantly positive regression coefficients but of low value, and the other half with nonsignificant regression coefficients.