Information Aggregation
The BIF project found out that private extension service could be built with one field agent mapped to about 50 farmers.
The addressed problem
BIF’s initial expectation was that once productivity improvements had been discovered, they could then simply be scaled up. However, the programme found that as one constraint was removed others presented themselves and the pathway to scale was non-linear.
Our discovery through BIF
In the information and advisory services market, the BIF project found out amongst other things that:
-
Smallholder farmers have limited access to information.
-
Broadcast timings for agricultural programmes are not synchronised with daily routines of male and female farmers.
-
Government extension service was only available at a rate of 1 extension worker to 10,000 farmers.
-
Absence of reliable farmer KYC data
-
Cost of data collection prohibitive
-
Expansion of projects beyond a certain number raises the Economics of Production unacceptably
