8. Information Costs

An important element in the design of interventions is how they will be financed in the long term. Until recently, it was assumed that information for agricultural and rural development was a global public good and should be made freely available to all. More recently, donors and governments have been shifting towards private-sector provision of agricultural extension services and information, and poorer farmers are losing out.
Capital investment costs for information infrastructure are high, but they are easy to calculate. In addition, there are many examples of successful cost recovery through charges for telephone use and advertising. It is more difficult to calculate the actual and hidden costs of providing information that empowers poorer farmers, and the social and economic benefit of doing so, without which it is difficult to justify public investment.
Furthermore, the economic sustainability of information services is affected by factors such as the providers’ ability to cover their own costs or, for services dependent on cost recovery, the customers’ ability to pay and the profitability. More work is urgently needed to explore these factors, and to develop a new consensus on who should pay for information for poorer farmers and how sustainable information services can be provided. However, when designing interventions, it is important to clearly determine from the beginning whether the intervention should be viewed as a public good (e.g. a school or a hospital) whose unfunded financial sustainability does not need to be a goal, or as a business whose success depends on its being able to generate enough revenue to pay costs and break even.