Sharing tips for rice, chicken and vegetable production: Do voice messages and social learning complement extension services?

Considerable resources are allocated to agricultural extension around the world, with questionable cost effectiveness. An obvious question is whether information and communication technologies can be used to push agricultural extension messages effectively at a lower cost. Based on a clustered randomized control trial, we evaluate a pilot in which farmers receive information about agricultural production on rice, vegetables, and chicken rearing via mobile phone voice messages. Our experimental design included groups of households without and with farmer group membership. We evaluate whether farmers received the information, learned it, shared it with non-recipients, and used it, and how the effects of the information campaign on these outcomes changes with being part of an existing farmer group and the proportion of the village population receiving information. We find farmers in the information treatment groups were more knowledgeable about the practices promoted, believe it helped them produce more, and shared it with others. The information campaign was more effective for rice and to a lesser extent chicken rearing than for vegetables. We do not find differential effects by farmer group membership. We find that the amount of information sent to the village increases information diffusion but the speed of sharing the information is similar across treatment groups and by different saturation rates. We conclude that targeted and simple information campaigns can help supplement the information needs of farmers in a cost-effective manner, independently of their participation in farmer groups or extension programs.