Working Paper Series 2015 – 4

Agricultural extension has a significant role to play in rural development. Yet, ‘extension’ itself is also developing and so is its role in development. How extension is understood, coordinated, financed and implemented has evolved over time. While agricultural extension used to be almost exclusively publicly funded and implemented in a top-down manner to increase productivity and transfer new technologies to small-scale farmers, since the late 1980s and 1990s the private sector has gradually become engaged in different ways and extension has evolved to being more participatory and holistic, at least in rhetoric.