Use of animated videos through mobile phones to enhance agricultural knowledge among bean farmers in Gurue District Mozambique

Abstract

<p>The current study focuses on the use of animated videos delivered through mobile phones to enhance agricultural knowledge and adoption among bean farmers in Gurà ºà ¨ District, Mozambique. Access to information is one of the key requirements that farmers need to improve their production. Extension workers are one of the main means through which farmers obtain accurate agricultural information. However, extension agents in Mozambique are too few and consequently only cover a small portion of farmers across the country. The theoretical approaches: (1) Information Processing and (2) Knowledge Gap, guided this study. This study is a field experiment with a pretest-posttest design involving 314 bean growing farmers. Farmers were randomly assigned to each of the four experimental treatments: (1) Extension ONLY, (2) Animation ONLY, (3) Extension THEN Animation and (4) Animation THEN Extension. The topic of the experiment was the use of sealed containers such as Jerrycans to safely store beans. Farmers were assessed on knowledge gain and intent to adopt the proposed technique. Regardless of the experimental treatment, all farmers had a significant increase in knowledge regarding the topic. Men and women learned about the same. Although participants in Extension Only had the lowest scores and those in Animation THEN Extension had the highest; The Animation ONLY group scored as well as both combined methods and significantly better than those in Extension ONLY. These results suggest that the use of animated videos through mobile phones can potentially complement or replace extension in delivering agricultural topics.</p>