Providing farmers with essential agricultural information and training in the era of COVID-19 has been a challenge that has prompted a renewed interest in digital extension services. There is a distinct gender gap, however, between men’s and women’s access to, use of, and ability to benefit from information and communication technologies (ICTs). The overall purpose of this research is to examine how digital extension can address gender inequality in rural areas in the context of the COVID-19 crisis by designing and evaluating the gendered impacts of a digital extension intervention delivered to 624 farmers (363 men and 261 women) (which included phone distribution, radio and SMS messages, and sharing of information prompts) in northern Tunisia. In order to assess the effectiveness of gender-responsive digital extension that targets husband and wife pairs, as opposed to only men, we employed logistic regression and descriptive statistics to analyze a sample of 242 farmers (141 women and 141 men). We find that phone ownership facilitated women’s access to their social network, as well as agricultural information and services, ultimately improving their participation in household decision making and agricultural production. We find that gender-responsive digital extension is effective for men and especially women in terms of usefulness, learning, and adoption. We identified education level and cooperative membership as important factors that determine the impact of digital extension services on farmers and demonstrate the positive impact of radio programming. We recommend strengthening phone access for women, targeting information (including through non-written ways) to both husbands and wives, using sharing prompts, and more rigorous extension for knowledge-intensive topics such as conservation agriculture and rural collectives.
Literature is scanty on how public agricultural investments can help reducing the impact of future challenges such as climate change and population pressure on national economies. The objective of this study is to assess the medium and long-term effects of...
This study explores the role of gender-based decision-making in the adoption of improved maize varieties. The primary data were collected in 2018 from 560 farm households in Dawuro Zone, Ethiopia, and were comparatively analyzed across gender categories of households: male...
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This work examined the determinants of the adoption of improved Irish potato technologies by farmers in three divisions of the Western Region of Cameroon. Data were collected from 170 farmers from 14 villages in our study area using a mixed-method...