The Rise and Fall of Training and Visit Extension: An Asian Mini-Drama With an African Epilogue

By Jock R. Anderson, G. Feder, S. Ganguly. 2006

175 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The paper reviews the origins and evolution of the Training and Visit (T&V) extension system, which was promoted by the World Bank in 1975-98 in over 50 developing countries. The discussion seeks to clarify the context within which the approach was implemented, and to analyze the causes for its lack of sustainability and its ultimate abandonment. The paper identifies some of the challenges faced by the T&V approach as being typical of a large public extension system, where issues of scale, interaction with the agricultural research systems, inability to attribute benefits, weak accountability, and lack of political support tend to lead to incentive problems among staff and managers of extension, and limited budgetary resources. The different incentives and outlook of domestic stakeholders and external donor agencies are also reviewed. The main cause of the T&V system's disappearance is attributed to the incompatibility of its high recurrent costs with the limited budgets available domestically, leading to fiscal unsustainability. The paper concludes with some lessons that apply to donor-driven public extension initiatives, and more generally to rural development fads. The role of timely, independent, and rigorous evaluative studies is specifically highlighted.

Subfields: Development, General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3688e0f90e1925a3e2ddf5a641d636f335875937

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In Development

In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

In Soil Science

Citations in the corpus

Maize Revolutions in Sub-Saharan Africa (2011, unknown): “The T&V approach aimed to improve performance of extension systems by strengthening their management and formulating specific and regular extension messages (Anderson et al., 2006).”
Review of agricultural extension in India: Are farmers' information needs being met? (2010, background): “During T&V, it was noted that larger-scale and richer farmers tended to be selected as the contact farmers, which reduced the capacity of the system to reach smallholder farmers (Anderson, Feder, and Ganguly 2006).”
Digital Green: Participatory video for agricultural extension (2007, background): “Agricultural extension in developing countries has seen a history spanning the services provided to export-oriented crop estates during the colonial era to productivity-focused strategies, such as the World Bank’s US$ 3 billion Training & Visit (T&V) system [5] that promoted Asia’s Green Revolution ”
An analysis of power dynamics within innovation platforms for natural resource management (2014, unknown): “…years, there has been a shift from linear approaches to technology and knowledge transfer exemplified by the World Bank Training and Visit Program (Anderson, Feder, and Ganguly 2006) to participatory approaches with the Farmer First initiative (Chambers 1994) and recently innovation system…”
The Empowerment Route to Well-being: An Analysis of Farmer Field Schools in East Africa (2012, background): “Client orientation is encouraged and extension messages need to have a broadened scope and cover rural livelihood in general as opposed to just agricultural techniques (Anderson et al., 2006; Qamar, 2006).”
How to Make Agricultural Extension Demand-Driven?: The Case of India’s Agricultural Extension Policy (2007, background): “The Training and Visit (T&V) system, promoted by the World Bank in more than 50 countries, became a major model for providing and managing extension (Purcell and Anderson, 1997; Anderson, Feder, and Ganguly 2006).”