Agricultural Extension through Information Technologies in Schools: Do the Cobbler's Parents go Barefoot?

We investigate the effectiveness of upper intergenerational transmission of knowledge (from children to parents) to promote awareness and behavior changes among adults. We designed and implemented a field experiment in a rural high school in the northern highlands of Peru, where we screened agricultural extension videos to students in the school's computer lab. We separately interview the parents of these high school students to assess their knowledge about the agricultural practices taught to their children. We find that, even when the information was not directly available to them, the information provided to the teenagers increased parents' knowledge of agricultural practices by 26%-34%. We also find that our intervention increased parents' adoption of the agricultural practices in the videos by 14-18%. Our intervention highlights the potential of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to deliver information to children and reach adult populations (who are not usually familiar with ICTs). While our intervention delivered agricultural advice, this method can potentially be expanded to provide other types of information to increase the knowledge and change the behavior of ICT-illiterate populations.