Communicating Agricultural Research to Farmers in Rural Areas in Nigeria: Key to National Development
Keywords:
Agricultural research, Communication strategy, development, extension service, Indigenous language and rural farmersAbstract
Pervasive underdevelopment keeps characterizing our society while sponsorship for Agricultural researches is on the increase. Most communities in Nigeria are agrarian with rural farmers who have little or no access to modern technology nor can communicate in any language other than their indigenous languages. The objective of this study is to investigate the impact of the use of indigenous language as an appropriate mode of communication, in the dissemination of Agricultural research findings on the development of the knowledge of the rural farmers. The study used the instruments of questionnaire and semi-structured interview to elicit information from the sample population which consists of 107 Agricultural researchers and Extension Officers in the Root Crops Institute and Michael Okpara University of Agriculture both in Umudike, Abia State, Nigeria, and focus groups of 200 rural farmers from the institutions’ host communities. The data generated from the questionnaire were analysed using mean simple equation and represented on a pie chart. The result shows that greater percent of the rural farmers are left in the dark of most of the scientific findings due to failure to communicate them using the appropriate language. The study therefore, concludes that there will be no meaningful development in a nation if the rural farmers who should provide food for the nation’s teeming population, fail to access the right information for the development of their farming system.
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