Women’s empowerment, agricultural extension, and digitalization: Disentangling information and role-model effects in rural Uganda

Els Lecoutere, David Spielman and Bjorn Van Campenhout

No March 2020, Project notes from International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)

Abstract: Women often have less access to agricultural information than men, constraining their participation in decision-making on crops, technologies, and practices. In the design of agricultural extension programs, women may be viewed as insignificant actors in agricultural production. Moreover, even if their role is recognized, valuable information on production does not flow freely within the household from men to women. Among groups of maize-farming households in eastern Uganda, we explore the impacts on women’s empowerment from the use of gender-responsive information and communication technologies to provide extension services, specifically videos that feature women as information providers. The research tests the relative impact of the videos, contrasting their informational effects versus their role model effects, on women’s knowledge, their agency, and their achievements in farming. The results show that targeting women with information increases their achievements in farming.

Keywords: agricultural extension systems; gender; agricultural extension; digital extension tools; maize; capacity development; empowerment; decision making; information; rural areas; women; Uganda; Eastern Africa; Africa; Sub-saharan Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-ict
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://hdl.handle.net/10568/143991

Related works:
Working Paper: Women’s empowerment, agricultural extension, and digitalization: Disentangling information and role model effects in rural Uganda (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fpr:prnote:pnmarch2020

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Project notes from International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().