Strengthening agricultural extension in South Africa

Sector

Agriculture

Project budget

The maximum budget for this project is € 600,000.

Organisations

This project has been developed by the Agricultural Research Council (ARC), Eastern Cape - Provincial Department of Agriculture (EC-PDA) and the University of Fort Hare. The tender for this project expired on 30 September 2011. Nuffic has awarded this tender to the International Centre for development oriented Research in Agriculture (ICRA), which has formed a consortium with the Centre for Development Innovation (CDI).

Project description

The growing agricultural extension sector offers a wide range of communication and learning activities for rural people organised by professionals from different disciplines, including:

• agriculture
• agricultural marketing
• health
• business studies

Analysts and policymakers increasingly believe that South Africa's significant skills shortage is one of the main causes of the many problems in the agricultural sector, including land reform and the difficulty of attracting new farmers.

The missing link

This lack of capacity is more and more seen as the 'missing link' in economic development and transformation. This project will, therefore, focus on improving training opportunities in order to improve extension services in terms of communication and technical skills.

The extension sector's main challenges are:

• South Africa's deep-rooted history of smallholder farming;
• the low education level of extension workers.

Participatory approach

This project will adopt a participatory approach to empower both extension service providers and farmers who cannot afford private extension workers.

Big Five modules

The five agricultural extension modules, developed under NPT project ZAF/112-174 and dubbed the 'Big Five', have already been used to train a number of extension officers in the Eastern Cape.

In order to use the modules in PDAs they have to be accredited and that is what this project will focus on. The extension modules will be developed into a learning workbook, facilitator guide and assessment guide. The materials will be aligned with SAQA standards to make the programme eligible for official accreditation.

Training-the-trainers

After that, staff at the ARC and University of Fort Hare will train the trainers of the Provincial Department. These trainers will train the extension workers operating in the department. The ARC will also prepare a roll-out strategy for the other six PDAs in South Africa.