Improving the Provisioning of Agricultural Extension Services in West Africa to Strengthen Land Management Practices: Case Studies of Burkina Faso and Ghana

The agrarian sector, as the key source of livelihood in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), has become highly vulnerable to changes in extension service deliveries. Farmers mainly lack access to technical advice, financial credits, farming inputs and mechanization tools while environmental challenges reinforce the adaptation of sustainable management practices. Therefore, an understanding how multi-functional actor relationships determine agricultural knowledge and information (AKI) sharing is required. This study contributes to filling this gap by characterizing horizontal and vertical interactions. By applying a social network analysis, we mapped actor relations along public–private-community co-operations to provide insights into structural dependencies at different administrative levels. Related to three sites distributed over Burkina Faso and Ghana, local perceptions were collected in stakeholder workshops to generate social network narratives. These narratives were analyzed by various metrics to identify patterns of partnerships and key actors. Study results reveal for Burkina Faso a slight shared network topology, while both sites in Ghana reflect a top-down flow of AKI. The statistical findings indicate that agricultural extension services are primarily delivered to farmers through a few key actors such as NGOs and farm-based organizations/cooperatives. Especially at the community level, the results show many reciprocal links between farmers, business actors and NGOs. This highlights a shift toward a pluralistic agricultural extension service system and underpins the demand for policies to support the long-term viability of these actors, in particular for regions where public extension agents are under-represented.