GFRAS is glad to launch its report "Digital Advisory Services: Global Lessons in Scaling Up Solutions", supported and financed by GIZ and BMZ.

🌏 A Global Exploration of Digital Upscaling

Join us on a journey across Anglophone and Francophone Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, where we draw lessons learned from these contexts on how the digitalization of rural advisory services is shaping the landscape of agriculture. Our report meticulously examines the current potentials and challenges inherent in the fusion of digital technologies and advisory services, unraveling how this dynamic synergy is contributing to the fortification of global food systems.

🌱 Guided by Principles for Digital Development

Built on the bedrock of the Principles for Digital Development, a comprehensive set of guidelines for integrating best practices into technology-enabled development programs, our report offers a profound insight into the intricate web of experiences drawn from diverse regions. Discover how these principles act as a compass, steering the course toward effective, ethical, and impactful digital interventions in rural advisory services.

Public and Private Sector: Unveiling Their Potential Roles

Delve into the report's exploration of the potential roles of both the public and private sectors in advancing digital advisory services. Uncover the dynamic interplay and synergies between these sectors and the innovative realm of public-private partnerships. Our findings shed light on how collaboration can be a catalyst for transformative change.

GFRAS: Trailblazing the Future of Advisory Services

As a trailblazer in the field, GFRAS stands at the forefront of capturing trends in advisory services. Our report is also evidence of GFRAS' commitment to pushing the boundaries and fostering a global dialogue on the transformative power of digitalization in rural advisory services.

Download the report here and share it with your networks!

Rural Advisory Services (RAS) are fundamental in supporting more than a billion small-scale farmers and other rural actors throughout the world (Nagarajan et al., 2020). These services assist them to deal with challenges and improve their livelihoods while increasing productivity and reducing hunger and poverty through innovation and strengthened capacities. Over the past ten years, digitalization in extension has received renewed worldwide interest, particularly with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This has not only dramatically increased the availability and affordability of many online services, but it has escalated the urgency for the development and application of digital extension.

Digitalization is considered the avenue to reach the 500 million smallholders that deserve better livelihoods and improved resilience against the adverse consequences of climate change and other environmental threats. As a contribution to the global discussion around this theme, the Global Forum for Rural Advisory Services (GFRAS) seeks to determine what kind of agricultural extension will be needed in the future to overcome today’s challenges.

Download this document to read more about the various ways in which digitalization has been impacting agriculture and rural advisory services.

GFRAS is happy to launch its Impact Stories document! This document describes several real-life examples that illustrate some of the different ways in which the GFRAS network adds value to the work of local actors and ongoing initiatives, with the aim of benefiting the lives and livelihoods of smallholder farmers around the globe.

You can read all of these stories and download this document here!

Prior to 2020, North America was not a formal member of the global GFRAS network. GFRAS members and partner networks signaled a strong interest in having more opportunities to learn about agricultural advisory services in North America. Accordingly, the leadership of GFRAS suggested the formulation of a North American network to provide a more robust interface and link to extension services globally and share unique perspectives from Canada, Mexico, and the United States. Agricultural leaders in North America were also interested in developing such a network—interaction between the agricultural extension programs of North America, and between the North American agricultural extension programs and the rest of the world was needed. After consultation with all three countries, the North American Agricultural Advisory Network (NAAAN) was formed in 2020.

The NAAAN is the newest of the GFRAS regional networks. The NAAAN Secretariat is hosted by the Colorado State University System (CSUS) and is guided by the NAAAN Steering Committee which is constituted of agricultural leaders from each of the three North American countries. 

Here, you will find its latest report, outlining priorities and activities in the region, mapping its actors, and hopefully providing support to regions who also want to strengthen its extension activities.

The report can be downloaded here:

 

Rasheed Sulaiman V, CoSAI Commissioner and Co-Chair of Working Group 3: Pathways for Innovation in Sustainable Agriculture Intensification; Director, Centre for Research on Innovation and Science Policy (CRISP), India, and a member of the GFRAS Board has written a Blog Post for the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture Intensification (CoSAI), on the importance of Agroecology in RAS.

His text, initially made available on CoSAI's website, is also reproduced here:

As the need for new approaches to sustainable agriculture increases, agroecological approaches have gained prominence in scientific, agricultural and political discourse. Agroecology is fundamentally different from other approaches to sustainable development in that it focuses on localized and bottom-up solutions, ensuring that farmers, their communities and their local knowledge are fully integrated in improving agricultural sustainability. This adaptable and flexible approach suggests ways to not only promote efficient and resilient agricultural systems, but to ensure food security and healthy diets, and support the conservation and restoration of biodiversity – thereby fulfilling the three pillars for integrated land use and food systems.

Promoting agroecology using extension and advisory services

One way to encourage the adoption of agroecology is with Extension and Advisory Services (EAS). EAS, also known as Rural Advisory Services, refer to all the different activities that provide farmers and other people living and working in rural settings with the information and services they need to increase agricultural productivity. However, while there is plenty of evidence for the importance of EAS in promoting good agricultural practices, they are not designed to support farmers to adopt sustainable agricultural practices like agroecology, which need the development of local solutions, horizontal learning and community action. Do EAS have the capacity to do this?

To date, the record of EAS in promoting sustainable agricultural practices has generally been poor. This is due to a lack of well-trained field staff, as well as the resources needed to provide advice to millions of small and marginal farmers. Specifically, there are three other fundamental challenges that prevent EAS from promoting agroecology effectively.

Firstly, EAS are designed to educate farmers about new technologies developed by public agricultural research organizations, which have not been the main source of knowledge about agroecology.

Secondly, EAS currently have a limited ability to generate context-specific and locally relevant solutions through the blending of local and expert knowledge. The way research and extension services are run will need to change if they are to give farmers a greater say in how research questions and solutions are developed.

Thirdly, many of these new challenges can only be addressed with new forms of interaction, organization and agreement between a range of actors. In addition to equipping EAS providers with more political, financial and policy support, the institutions and governance of EAS require transformation so that they can better respond to the needs of farmers and other stakeholders.

Changes needed within EAS to promote agroecology

Overcoming these challenges requires change across all aspects of EAS. In order to provide locally specific solutions, EAS need to start blending local farming insights with expert knowledge. The implementation of these localized solutions can be further helped by hiring EAS extension workers from local communities – people who understand the local conditions and are accountable to farmer groups – rather than from EAS providers. Advances in digital technology will help farmers and workers generate and share valuable data on local pest and disease dynamics. And, perhaps most importantly, the overall aim of EAS needs to shift from simply increasing productivity to improving agricultural sustainability and resilience, so that farms can remain healthy and productive for many years to come.

To make these changes, EAS should partner with ongoing initiatives promoting agroecology, such as civil society organizations and farmer networks. The Pathways for Innovation Study commissioned by CoSAI is currently investigating how practitioners and investors can better achieve the economic, environmental and social objectives of sustainable agricultural intensification, and is expected to generate some very pertinent lessons on the factors that help to scale up sustainable agriculture – lessons which could be important for EAS and agroecology. The Global Forum for Rural Advisory Services (GFRAS) community, comprising regional and country platforms, could play a major role in helping EAS support and promote agroecology through advocacy, generating lessons and promoting knowledge exchange among EAS providers.

The promotion of agroecology is not without its challenges. For instance, conventional approaches to measuring farm productivity through yield or income from a single crop are not suited to measure agroecological practices. Moreover, the specificity of agroecological practices may make them difficult to transfer between farmers through standard research and extension approaches. Nevertheless, by proactively developing pathways for embracing agroecology, EAS can be an important part of the solution in addressing agricultural sustainability.