For smallholders in developing countries, information on weather, markets and agricultural techniques is key to improving productivity. But what is the best way of delivering that information? Here, three projects based on radio, mobile technology and social networking give an insight into what can work.

Radio

Radio has been used to provide agricultural extension services to smallholders in Africa for decades. Until recently, however, there was no substantial evidence of the actual impact of radio on improving agricultural practices, and how to maximise it.

The African Farm Radio Research Initiative (Afrri) started looking into this from 2007 in a 42-month research project, implemented by Farm Radio International (FRI) in partnership with World University Service of Canada (WUSC), and with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Afrri specifically researched the effectiveness of a new type of radio campaign developed by FRI: the participatory radio campaign (PRC), where farmers were actively involved in selecting and developing topics ranging from disease-resistant varieties of cassava to methods of animal enclosure, composting, mulching, and intercropping.

The project worked with 25 radio stations in five countries to research, design, broadcast, monitor and evaluate 49 PRCs, reaching approximately 40 million smallholder farmers. What it found was that farmer involvement in creating radio broadcasts translated directly into greater adoption of the practices.

"From our research we know that the more farmer voices are featured on a given programme, the more likely farmers will listen and subsequently gain knowledge," says Kevin Perkins, executive director of Farm Radio International.

"This is even more so when radio programmes are designed with farmer input, and when broadcasters solicit feedback from farmers and use it to improve their programmes."

Data gathered by the project showed that in "active listening communities", where the radio audience included farmers who had taken part in the programming, an average of 39% of farmers adopted the practices discussed on the radio.

While radio itself may not be technologically new, Afrri's research suggests that its impact depends on how it is used. The participatory radio campaigns have shown that more modern technologies, such as mobile phones, can be used with radio to make it more effective.

Farmers can phone in, and interviews can be carried out in the field. Perkins calls this "Radio 2.0".

Another important finding was that even in "passive listening communities", where farmers were not directly involved in making the programmes, 21% went on to adopt the practices discussed too.

This may be less than the 39% in active listening communities, but as radio is relatively easy to scale up to a large audience, many thousands – even millions – of farmers could be encouraged to adopt better agricultural practices. All they need is to hear more people like themselves on the airwaves.

Mobile technology

Mobile technology is increasingly seen as having huge potential in agricultural development, with SMS-based information services such as Nokia Life Tools and Reuters Market Light now available to millions of farmers.

These services have gained a high profile, but one recent study found limited evidence of their actual impact on prices received by farmers, or the likelihood of changing crop varieties and cultivation practices.

So how might mobile technology be used to make a tangible difference for farmers? The Grameen Foundation in Uganda has found a way, by training representatives from farming communities to act as mobile technology go-betweens in its Community Knowledge Worker (CKW) project.

Community knowledge workers are farmers themselves, so they are embedded in the agricultural community. Armed with smartphones featuring a purpose-built app, they talk to other farmers to provide agricultural tips, weather forecasts, prices, an input supplier directory, and a market platform linking buyers and sellers. They also collect data from them to create an information loop.

Launched in 2010, the CKW project has trained 1,139 farmer representatives who have served 147,302 farmers. They are paid $2 a day, about double of what they earn from farming.

"As poor farmers themselves, CKWs serve as 'feet in the field' visiting other poor farmers, helping them access specific information, facilitating adoption of farming technologies and encouraging ongoing use of agriculture advice," says Sean Paavo Krepp, Uganda country director for the Grameen Foundation.

In 2012, a impact study reported on what CKWs had achieved in terms of influencing farming practices and prices earned.

The study identified a direct impact on market awareness and prices. Farmers served by CKWs had a greater propensity to value market price data in their production and marketing decisions, and as a result they sold their maize for an average of 22% more than farmers not served by CKWs. Farmer knowledge of issues such as crop management, pests and diseases and animal husbandry had also increased by 17% compared to before the CKW intervention.

The CKW model appears to work because it is more than just a mobile data delivery channel. Having access to information is one thing; acting on it is another. CKWs encourage that action.

"CKWs are trusted intermediaries who are selected by their communities to serve them," says Paavo Krepp. "It means that agricultural advice can be contextualised to each individual farmer in their own language or dialect. Our aim now is to build a CKW network that is capable of serving over 200,000 smallholders while proving a replicable and portable model which can be scaled to other regions."

Social networking

How do you create a social networking platform for people who aren't even online yet? This is an emerging area of work, and one example is Digital Green's Farmerbook project in India which still relies – for now – on paper print-outs of profiles.

Digital Green launched in 2006 as a Microsoft research project but now operates as an independent NGO. Its core work is the production of short videos on agricultural techniques, which are made by and for farmers themselves and are highly localised in their content and language or dialect. To date, it has produced more than 2,500 short films and reached around 150,000 farmers.

Last year, with funding from the Ford Foundation, it went a step further by launching Farmerbook, a social networking platform for farmers and the facilitators who show the videos in each village and lead discussions among small groups of 12-15 farmers. These facilitators were already gathering lots of data and feedback from the farmers about the videos they were watching and the techniques they were adopting. With Farmerbook, all that information is being turned into personal farmer profiles and plotted on a map, available to view on the Farmerbook web page.

Mediators print and share these profiles at the meetings, creating a local social networking system within the group and beyond, to include the whole village.

"There are usually six to eight groups per village," says Rikin Gandhi, chief executive of Digital Green. "So there might be 100 people in the village. That may seem small, but in reality they often operate at caste or familial levels, and might not have a relationship with others. Using Farmerbook, and printing off the village pages, facilitators can connect these individuals and groups so they can reflect on why some farmers do one thing or another."

Previous research had already found that the Digital Green model of disseminating agricultural knowledge through group video viewing was at least five times more likely to encourage farmers to adopt the new practices compared to existing extension systems. The organisation is now working on a controlled study specifically on the impact of Farmerbook, evaluating the change in practices brought about by the social networking platform compared to the existing video model.

For now, Farmerbook is still an online/offline hybrid form of social networking, with mainly just the facilitators themselves actually online. But as mobile technology continues to expand, Digital Green is anticipating the farmers themselves being online and taking the networking into their own hands.

"We're now working on making a mobile, accessible version of Farmerbook," says Gandhi. "Things are moving fast, and I think in 3-5 years even the most interior communities will have data connectivity and be able to use the platform ."

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