Access to agricultural services

1. Agricultural services 
2. Access to services by the poor
3. Trends in the rural environment and implications for agricultural services
4. Challenges
5. Successful responses and success factors

1. Agricultural services

Rural services are the services provided to families, individuals and households that live or work in rural areas. They include research, advice, training and the intermediate services that facilitate access to knowledge, information and finance. Rural services, in particular agricultural services, are extremely heterogeneous. They primarily address crop and animal production and natural resource management, but also include the preparation of crop and animal production, the post-harvest handling of agricultural produce and the marketing of products.

2. Access to services by the poor 

Access to services is important for the rural poor living in areas with inadequate infrastructure and far away from basic social services and health centres. The poor often tend to be trapped in poverty because of less favourable location-specific characteristics; their meagre assets that do not allow them to invest in education; their lack of access to credit and productive labour; and the exclusion from access to resources and markets.
Services can contribute to strengthening the poor's assets and to sustaining and enhancing their livelihoods. To do so, they need to be accessible, that is (1) available (ready for use when needed), (2) affordable (effective at low costs), and (3) socially inclusive, (accessible to the most vulnerable groups in rural areas).
Whether agricultural research and advisory services are accessible to the rural poor, are responsive to their needs and are complementary to other support services depends on the interaction between policies, institutions and organizations.
Provision of (information on) agricultural technologies therefore is not sufficient. Agricultural services have to be facilitators of knowledge management and mindset changes of stakeholders operating in the rural environment, and broker improved interaction between them. Services need to be demand-driven and locally specific and aim at empowering farmers, building their capacities and involving them in service demand and delivery.

3. Trends in the rural environment and implications for agricultural services

The rural environment, however, is continuously and rapidly changing due to a range of global and national processes that impact on agricultural markets. These chances include demographic trends such as urbanisation, overall economic growth, increased liberalisation of agricultural trade and the integration of markets, increasing commodity prices, national policy and institutional developments, climate change and emerging diseases of zoonotic origin.
Not only rural livelihoods are affected by this changing context. It also impacts the type and the ways rural services are provided. The changing architecture of aid and the developments in information and communication technology increase the need for flexibility and innovative capacity of services both in terms of service contents and delivery methods.
It is essential that services are considered within their context and their complexity. Using a systems perspective instead of focusing on technical aspects will ensure that such complexities are better understood. The innovation systems perspective for agricultural services underlines the institutional context and policy including governance of the system, the functional relationships, the services and stakeholders with their capacities. The innovation system perspective is based on the premise that improved, innovative practices that enhance access to rural services and hence improved livelihoods require interaction and interactive learning among the stakeholders.

4. Challenges 

With the innovation systems perspective as a point of departure, rural services in general and agricultural services in particular, are faced with a series of challenges. These entail the capacities of the rural poor as service users, the capacities of service providers to deliver sustainable, relevant and quality services to the poor and the enabling policies and institutional arrangements for pro-poor services. Key questions include:
• How may the rural poor be empowered to voice their needs for services?
• How may innovative capacities of the rural poor be enhanced, so they will be better able to formulate effective demands for services?
• How to enhance interaction between smallholder farmers and other stakeholders?
• How to design services that help farmers respond to a changing context including new regulations and standards?
• In what way should services be designed and implemented in order for them to reach the poor and most vulnerable among them? How may the rural poor become actively involved in this process?
• What do service providers need to enhance their accountability to their clients and how may the rural poor be stimulated to engage in the M&E of services?
• What is needed to ensure sustainability of service provision, specifically to the poorest?
• How to make use of Information and Communication Technology?
• What is needed for rural financial services to contribute effectively to smallholder farmers' activities and protect the poor from risks such as climatic hazards, price variations and credit supply?
• How to facilitate complementarities and effective synergy between different types of services and service providers? How to link these to those operating and offered at national and local levels? What institutional arrangements are needed to enhance social inclusion of services? How can they be designed and implemented?
• How should policies be designed that increase the opportunities for facilitation services and mediation?

5. Successful responses and success factors

In recent years, studies have been undertaken to identify how farmers and service providers have responded to these challenges and what the most likely success factors have been to make these responses effective. Key lessons from these studies include the following: 

• It is essential to link financial services that are adapted to the specific situations of the rural poor and provide opportunities to enhance innovative capacities, with other services, in particular for the most vulnerable

• Farmers' organizations can play various roles in the pro-poor orientation of services. They can lobby for an enabling policy and institutional environment, facilitate the voice of the rural poor, influence advancing socially inclusive research and advisory service agendas and become involved in the implementation of research and advisory services

• The capacities  of farmers' organizations need strengthening to ensure that they are able to articulate inclusive demands

• Service providers need to:
 • Differentiate services in accordance with intended beneficiaries, in  particular focusing on vulnerable groups to enhance social inclusion,
 • Design, in close participation with the rural poor, appropriate methods for pro-poor services that effectively respond to the needs of the rural poor,
 • Coordinate services at the local level to enhance coherence and synergy of services, a more efficient use of services by the rural poor, and to stimulate interaction and learning between service providers,
 • Take up new roles as intermediary and facilitator services - rather than as disseminators of information- and ensure  effective links between productive investments, technological and financial service innovation, risk management and vulnerability reduction  

• In terms of enabling policies and institutional arrangements for pro-poor services the following are needed:
 • Multi-stakeholder driven evidence (through local knowledge institutes) for effective policy context change in terms of innovation, decentralization, public-private partnerships and rural empowerment,
 • Policies and mechanisms that enable interaction between farmers', private sector and research and advisory organizations through institutional innovations (platforms, funding mechanisms, regulation and certification etc.),
 • Continuous interaction between rural service providers and the rural poor and information of service users,
 • Building social capital for improved interaction amongst stakeholders and enhanced performance of the Agricultural Information System,
 • Capacity enhancement among local governments and authorities to steer and coordinate services and service systems for effective service delivery.
 

Reference:
Nederlof, E.S., B. Wennink and W. Heemskerk. Access to agricultural services - Background paper for the IFAD Rural Poverty Report 2010