A Case For Participatory (Cost Sharing) Approach to Agricultural Extension Delivery in Nigeria

Abstract

In Nigeria, it is the Small Scale agricultural producers that collectively sustain the nation. Privatization and Commercialization programmes in Nigeria were designed and implemented in the past towards the benefit of hand picked individuals at the expense of the resource- poor farmers who gladly relinquished their valuable parcels of land for the development of governments’ projects which were privatized to these wealthy individuals. Besides, resource-poor farmers never benefited from specialized governments’ programmes designed for the upliftment of the welfare of the rural poor (resource-poor farmers), including the so called subsidies on fertilizers. These existing inequalities in the nations’ agricultural and rural development policies, including agricultural extension services, necessarily give the credence to the idea that, at this time of the nation’s affluence, agricultural extension delivery services to resource-poor farmers should not be privatized or commercialized. Instead, this paper is recommending the participatory (cost sharing) approach to the nation’s agricultural extension services as a panacea to the current effort to source for appropriate agricultural extension service for Nigeria.