7.1 The New Roles of Extension

Historically, extension has mainly involved in technology transfer. However, recently the need for farmer cooperatives in providing various input, marketing, and educational services to the farmers is growing. The demand for knowledge and skill in organizing farmers in to effective cooperative has also increased. For instance, in Ethiopia cooperatives of different kinds are flourishing both the number and capital. In this aspect extension is expected to take a leading role in organizing and empowering farmers. Community mobilization and facilitation skills have to be part of training and education programmes for both the medium and higher level Extension professionals.
  • Empowering Role of Extension

The empowerment role can be a foundation of the new approach to extension. Extension professionals need to develop a new philosophy where their role is to help farmers and rural communities organize themselves and take charge of their growth and development.

  • Human Resource Development Role

The human resource development approach empowers people and has implications to all other roles. The entire philosophy of human capacity building is to encourage rural communities to understand and to improve their planning, implementation, and monitoring skills of development programs.


Figure 7:Community Training on natural resource management
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This Learning Resource was Created by the Regional MSc AICM Program at the Haramaya University RDAE Department with Support of AgShare Project.