Outsourcing agricultural advisory services

In recent years, several countries in Sub-Saharan Africa have experimented with outsourcing agricultural advisory services at the local level (through pilot programmes), as well as with the scaling up of these pilot activities to cover increasingly larger areas and greater numbers of farmer beneficiaries.
While it is generally thought that outsourcing will benefit resource-poor farmers by orienting services towards their needs, not much is known about the implications of outsourcing or about outsourcing modalities.

This dossier presents the experiences from outsourcing programs in Tanzania, Mozambique, Uganda and Mali in order to contribute to interactive learning between practitioners and policy-makers involved in outsourcing in sub-Saharan Africa.
The lessons learned concern the enabling environment at local and national level, demand and supply capacity, changing roles and responsibilities, outsourcing functions and performance of outsourcing systems, as well as the overriding importance of institutional development.