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AgExtOnline • Message Form Decision Aid

How Should I Reach Farmers?

Answer a few practical questions about your audience, your message and how open farmers are to new advice. The tool separates the channels that can carry the learning from those that spread the word, rates each for reach, cost per farmer and effectiveness, checks whether the mix can reach enough farmers, and lists the questions to answer before committing.
One decision only: this tool helps choose how to deliver an already-defined extension message. More than one channel is usually needed: some carry the learning and the action, others spread the word and remind.
Trust comes first Farmers act on advice they believe, and many wait to see a new practice work for someone they respect before trying it. The same message can be ignored from an unknown number and acted on after a demonstration on a neighbour’s farm. Reach without trust rarely changes practice.
Where this fits: the Needs Assessment & Scale Planner helps you choose which problem to work on. “Should I Recommend This?” checks whether the solution is sound. This tool is the last step — how that message reaches farmers. It is the Message form and delivery step of ASK ME. For who will keep delivering it after the project ends, see Plan for Scale (check 3).
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What are you delivering, and to whom?

Write it down first. The questions below are about this specific message and this specific audience.

1. The audience: how many, where, and what they can use

How many farmers you need to reach and how hard they are to get to are different questions. Answer both.
The number this message must reach, not the number living in the area.
How hard it is to get to these farmers, whatever their number.
Where reading is low, the message has to travel by voice, pictures or in person.
Basic phones are enough for SMS and voice messages (IVR). WhatsApp, video and apps need smartphones.

2. What does the message require?

Focus on what farmers need in order to understand and act.

3. Will farmers believe it and act on it?

Trust is often the difference between a message that is heard and one that is used. It matters most when acting on the advice costs farmers money, effort or risk.
Whoever the message comes from. Advice that failed in the past, rumours or project fatigue all lower it.
The bigger the risk, the more trust farmers need before they act.

4. Who could carry the message, and what can you put behind it?

Start with where farmers already get this kind of information. Then rate how present each type of messenger is with this audience in this area.
Building on a trusted route farmers already use is usually cheaper and more credible than creating a new one.
Extension agents, livestock officers, development agents. Official and long-term, but often few and stretched.
For example CAHWs and paravets: trained or licensed through government or projects, often paid by farmers.
For example input suppliers, agro-vet shops, CAVEs, feed traders and milk collectors. Regular contact through business, but advice can be shaped by what they sell.
NGOs, faith-based organisations and project field teams. Resources and flexibility, usually for a limited period.
Your team’s time and money, whichever of the groups above you belong to, to produce content, train and support messengers, and pay running costs such as airtime, events or transport. What you can sustain, not what the proposal says.

Suggested delivery approach

Use this as a starting point for local testing and judgement, not as a prescription. Ratings are relative judgements for your situation, not measurements.

Primary channels

Carry the learning and the action: where farmers understand, see, ask and try.

Reach and reinforcement channels

Spread the word, remind, and point farmers to the primary channels. Doing this job well is not a second prize.

Putting it together

Can this reach enough farmers at a sensible cost?

Trust: who farmers need to hear it from

Channels facing a major barrier

Questions to answer before committing

    A channel is not inherently good or bad. Its usefulness depends on the audience, the message, and what farmers need to do with it. Radio may be a poor way to teach a practice and an excellent way to warn of an outbreak. Nothing here is an absolute — local knowledge beats a general rule, and every barrier the tool names has somewhere been worked around. Whatever the channel, farmers act only when they believe the message and the people behind it.
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    developed by Mark Bell and David Bunn (2026)