adminCharles Dhewa Review Correspondent
While farmers are willing to pay for inputs like seed, fertiliser, pesticides, herbicides and livestock breeds, very few are willing to pay for information and knowledge that supports viable use of these inputs.
If everyone agrees knowledge is power, one would expect farmers and other agricultural value chain actors to scramble for the most useful information. Given that it has become one of the most important agricultural input, knowledge cannot continue to be considered a public good if agriculture is to be a real business for farmers and all actors.
However, since government agricultural extension services and non-governmental organisations have promoted a public service view of agricultural information delivery, it will take some effort to change the mind set of farmers who have become accustomed to getting information and advisory services for free.
At the moment, we have very few farmers operating on 100 percent economic models where everything is paid for including knowledge. If a farmer would cost training from Agritex, inputs, labour and capital depreciation (depletion of equipment such as ploughs), the cost of producing a ton of maize would be around $400.
With the public service role of Agritex and some NGOs who are providing extension services, at least 30% of costs that were supposed to be incurred by farmers are being met by social efforts. If farmers paid for services, an Agritex Officer would service less than 10 farmers per ward or district.
What about the market side?
A public goods information and advisory services model being provided in the production side by Agritex and NGOs has to be extended to the market side where actors like knowledge brokers are delivering services without any subsidy. Given the central role of agriculture markets, knowledge brokers working in the market should be supported by government or social investors. Unlike training and capacity building programmes from the production side where a farmer can be equipped with production and other related skills and then share this information with other farmers, generating marketing information and advisory services is a fluid knowledge system, which requires continuous socio-economic partnership between actors.
Subsidising market information and knowledge provision will build a strong agricultural knowledge ecosystem buttressed with ICTs. At the moment, a farmer cannot walk into one place where fluid information and knowledge from all the country’s 52 districts in consolidated for immediate use and decision making. The levels of fragmentation and knowledge asymmetry is higher in the market where a farmer is expected to get information from 20 different informal markets at once.
It costs money to generate and consolidate agricultural information and knowledge although it is considered public goods. Innovative ways of financing this process are badly needed. There is a difference between news/information and knowledge. While news or information can be available through radio, television and newspapers, knowledge is at a much deeper and decision making level — enabling a farmer to make real time informed decisions.
Given a culture of reluctance to pay for information, very few farmers buy newspapers. The literate majority would rather borrow the paper. That is why in some rural areas you find people reading a newspaper that was published two or six months ago. On the other hand, most news bulletins focus on events like agricultural shows yet the most valuable information and knowledge for farmers is in the form of flows and trends provided 24 hours a day. Farmers need information that they can question and add value to on a regular basis.
Here is a bit of information
from experience
Our experience is that once farmers identify an enterprise that generates and provides information, they call to get as much information as possible and then share freely with their peers. While there have been considerable successes with short message services, there is no national model that can support a sustainable call centre for farmers. Unless a service is inbuilt with mobile service providers, a call centre remains a social enterprise offering free services. A farmer who calls will have bought airtime and the money will have gone to a mobile service provider as opposed to a knowledge provider. An ideal situation should see network providers collaborating with knowledge brokers.
Since knowledge sharing contributes to economies of scale, a farmer has to share information with other farmers in order to produce what is required by the market in terms of quality and volume. One shares information with the extended family, community leaders, etc. Even if a knowledge broker tries to sell information to one farmer, the way it travels will not give the broker good returns.
One of the reasons we need social investors in agricultural knowledge development is because most smallholder farmers do not seem to have the capacity to pay for market-determined agricultural intelligence which costs money to gather. Under normal market forces, most smallholder farmers would be excluded from services that cost money to generate.
Lack of resources often inhibit the marginalised from working with the private sector. This gap can be filled by donors and NGOs, leaving sustainable relationships to blossom for the good of everyone involved. While donors and NGOs are trying to promote social entrepreneurship, they don’t seem to be sufficiently linking communities with private players during the course of their projects, preferring do so when projects are phasing out.
Towards a social entrepreneurship knowledge generation and sharing model
We have to embrace a social entrepreneurship knowledge delivery model that combines social and economic aspects. The model recognises that while some farmers and community members are disadvantaged, there is potential for them to move to a better level if supported in this transition. Some farmers and rural people have entrepreneurial capabilities but their social status inhibits them. External support can facilitate the required social mobility.
Under this model, producer groups that are supported by a project for two to three farming seasons should be able to graduate and engage with market forces. As part of social entrepreneurship, banks can invest in knowledge around financial literacy which can improve the performance of farmers. Enabled farmers become long-term clients for the bank.
Through social entrepreneurship, commodities from smallholder farmers become competitive to a point where the farmers can competitively pay for knowledge and information. Social investors can support knowledge brokers in the market so that services extended to farmers see them graduate from being ‘beneficiaries to clients who can demand and pay for knowledge. In the past, farmers have paid for information and knowledge through contractual arrangements with contracting companies. Now that the informal market is taking the place of contractual companies, actors in the market space should be supported so that they are able to consolidate market intelligence into knowledge. More than 70 percent of commodities from smallholder farmers are flocking to the informal market and knowledge around this market has to be gathered for all value chain actors including policy makers. This effort will create a sustainable pathway from subsistence to viable commercial agriculture. It is principally a cognitive divide that has to be bridged so that embedded inequalities in agricultural value chains are be addressed through skilful knowledge acquisition and sharing.
This is a process rather than an event. Such a transition has to be supported consciously by government and social investors. The delivery of social services should be a stepping stone to economic business models. That kind of transition requires knowledge brokers able to combine and recombine different forms of knowledge. A transition in the agricultural knowledge system should be in line with growth in business.
While novices like youth can be supported with social services, they need a clear graduation path along which they develop viable business models enabling them to eventually pay for services. The advantage of this approach is that it is demand-driven such that services become tailor-made for specific needs. Farmers do not just receive information about maize production when they are interested in growing potatoes.
Two to three agricultural seasons should be enough for a farmer to receive social services and thereafter the farmer starts paying for services based on viable economic models that demand specific services. At that point the role of extension officers should evolve to one of providing basic and generic information/services to up-coming farmers. An important related role for extension officers will be conducting training needs assessments and linking farmers to different experts who can tailor-make services based on the needs of various farmers. The extensions services department can receive a fee for these facilitation roles.
Based on knowledge pathways, farmers move from beneficiaries to clients and local resource persons. Agritex activities will pull other actors along market-oriented value chain training and capacity building so that we move farmers from a free lunch syndrome where even those who are able to pay for services are still reluctant to do so.
Nothing changes until mindset changes
A strong cognitive and knowledge base will benefit everyone in Zimbabwe’s agriculture-driven economy. The current fragmentation of knowledge inhibits growth and development. Once farmers are equipped with knowledge and are able to use it, they should be able to eventually pay for it. Profit-oriented organisations do not operate in isolation. That is why, unless we have some social enterprise along the value chain, the cost of products to the end users will be very expensive and unaffordable. Somewhere along the value chain we have providers of indigenous knowledge and market information, among others. This kind of service delivery has to be supported by social investors towards building a strong knowledge and entrepreneurial base for smallholder farmers.
There is a tendency for beneficiaries of social enterprises to be in the comfort zone. For example, when suddenly farmers are made to pay for information they may think their entitlement is being taken away. On the other hand where more public goods are available there is no maximum utilisation because most of these services are not demand-driven.
Within development partners, farmer unions and government departments, we don’t seem to have consistent ways of delivering knowledge which enable farmers to move from being beneficiaries to clients and ultimately to local resource persons. There should be enough good practices from which many classes of farmers can learn.
Just as formal schools have syllabi, extension departments should have a tailored syllabus which can be used by school leavers who fail to enter college but are skilled and passionate enough to do organised agriculture. At least 60 percent of school leavers do not make it into colleges and universities. There is no proper career pathway for these young people as if to say once one does not qualify to enter college they become a socio-economic reject. They need a consolidated and tailor-made practical curriculum around which they can demonstrate their potential. We need to move from a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) model to social entrepreneurship whose results are more sustainable. CSR treats people as beneficiaries where as social entrepreneurship looks at people as clients and active participants. By supporting social entrepreneurship, an enterprise builds a clientele base which will see the poor becoming self-sustaining to the point of becoming buyers and suppliers for the enterprise. Local people end up building the enterprise’s reputation in the community and provide useful feedback that can trigger continuous innovation.
Surfacing hidden world views
Agricultural production and marketing are shared processes. We have to be very creative in order to get farmers’ hidden world views on the table. Farmers engage in empathetic relationships and meaningful conversations with traders and other value chain actors. Knowledge is a key input in moving farmers from one mind set to the other. Social entrepreneurship can result in the emergence of demand-led adaptive practices. Since social change processes interconnect with ideas about interests and power, we have to design a knowledge pathway for farmers of all classes and cognitive levels. Knowledge brokering services will create a middle ground for theory and practice to come together and contribute to an inclusive agricultural ecosystem. In the current knowledge economy we should be able to pose the following question: To the extent that they are knowledge sharing outfits, what is the contribution of Agritex and other service delivery organisations to Gross Domestic Product (GDP)?
- Charles Dhewa is a proactive knowledge management specialist and head consultant of Knowledge Transfer Africa (Pvt) whose flagship eMKambo has a presence in more than 20 agricultural markets in Zimbabwe. Feedback: [email protected], +263 774 430 309 / 772 137 717/ 712 737 430.
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