The Role of Extension in the Green Revolution

Given that the rice Green Revolution involves adopting management-intensive production practices, the role of extension is critically important to its realization in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). This chapter reviews the existing literature on the role of extension services, examines their effectiveness, and identifies challenges in advancing the research. After briefly examining the evolution of extension models, we discuss the importance and difficulty of obtaining credible estimates of the impact of extension because of endogeneity concerns. We then review the empirical evidence from existing studies, focusing primarily on the rice sector in SSA. We find that most studies show positive and significant impacts of extension on rice intensification, income, and profits, particularly when training includes management-intensive cultivation practices. Thus, the provision of rice cultivation training ought to be a vital entry point to the full-fledged Green Revolution in SSA. We also argue the importance of using income and profits as outcomes and consider spillover effects to fully understand the benefits of extension. Finally, we discuss some remaining research issues, including who should become farmer trainers to facilitate the information spillover.