Diffusion of information among small-scale farmers in Senegal

Knowledge is an important factor to realize productivity increases in agriculture in developing countries. The generation and diffusion of knowledge on sustainable farming practices has long been a problem in promoting rural development especially in Africa. . A new concept of farmer training called the "Farmer Field School" (FFS) was developed in the 1980s by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Indonesia for the promotion of integrated pest management (IPM1 ), and promised to be an effective tool to extend knowledge to farmers (Pontius et al. 2002). It has been shown that FFS helps to increase farmer knowledge (Godtland et al. 2004), and studies in several Asian countries demonstrated that FFS can be effective in reducing the excessive use of chemical pesticides (e.g. Tripp et al. 2005; Winarto 2004; Praneetvatakul and Waibel 2005). However, the expected economic benefits are not always unambiguously ascertainable as shown for example by a study of Feder et al. (2002) in Indonesia. While much of the investment in FFS has taken place in Asia, more recently FAO has introduced FFS in Africa, which some analysts have questioned from a strategic point of view (Eicher 2003). In particular, doubts were raised regarding the expected diffusion effects of knowledge from trained farmers to non-participants, which are essential for achieving large-scale impact of FFS (Rola et al. 2002; Feder et al. 2004). Link: http://www.econstor.eu/dspace/bitstream/10419/19855/1/Witt.pdf