Array Mira
| Country | United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland |
|---|
This member participated in the following Forums
Forum Forum: "Mobile Information Services" November, 2011
Question 2: What are the barriers to reaching scale with mobile agriculture information services and...
Hello Stephane,
Many thanks for your insightful contributions to this discussion!
I just wanted to comment on your assertion that a call centre with handling capacity of 70 requests per day may not be an improvement on existing in-person extension service delivery.
As a matter of act, I have been working on some research on the efficiency of extension service delivery and I find that extension agents in Ghana are occupied by the delivery of technical advice roughly 15-20% of the time. Administrative and project delivery activities are prominent among their activities.
Certainly, it would depend on the level we are considering (district, region, or national) but responding to 70 technical questions per day strikes me as a considerable capacity. In many cases I would expect it to provide efficiency gains over in-person delivery. Yet, what I would be concerned about is the articulation of the demand for the service. From what we are seeing, in-person technical advisory services are triggered more so by the extension agents noticing the need and delivering the advice, rather than farmers expressing the demand.
Cheers,
Mira
Hello Stephane,
Many thanks for your insightful contributions to this discussion!
I just wanted to comment on your assertion that a call centre with handling capacity of 70 requests per day may not be an improvement on existing in-person extension service delivery.
As a matter of act, I have been working on some research on the efficiency of extension service delivery and I find that extension agents in Ghana are occupied by the delivery of technical advice roughly 15-20% of the time. Administrative and project delivery activities are prominent among their activities.
Certainly, it would depend on the level we are considering (district, region, or national) but responding to 70 technical questions per day strikes me as a considerable capacity. In many cases I would expect it to provide efficiency gains over in-person delivery. Yet, what I would be concerned about is the articulation of the demand for the service. From what we are seeing, in-person technical advisory services are triggered more so by the extension agents noticing the need and delivering the advice, rather than farmers expressing the demand.
Cheers,
Mira