ICT channel fitness to improve agricultural information delivery to farmers in developing countries

Abstract

In farmer’s daily agricultural efforts, information seeking plays an important role to handle matters related to farming activities. It is important to provide quality agricultural information on time to enable farmers to increase their productivity. Therefore, many governments and international cooperation organizations around the world have tried to develop and disseminate quality agricultural information to farmers. Correspondingly, various Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) services have been set up in developing countries to disseminate information and farmers have been exposed to ICT services on the information. ICT on information is any ICT resource that allows farmers to access and utilize information on agriculture. Besides, the proliferation of the Internet and mobile devices has been recognized as a good ICT channel for delivering related information. The utilization of information disseminated by ICTs may improve the farmer's agricultural productivity. Despite the wide use of ICT channels by farmers in developing countries, the effective utilization of information is far below the expectations. Farmers in developing countries are still not achieving high productivity due to channel incompatibility, and a lack of access to accurate, relevant, reliable, timely, and updated information. To fill the identified gaps in previous research, an investigation needed to be conducted on the issue of fitness (matching) among ICT channel utilization and information delivery by the Information-Channel-Fit (ICF) model that relies on Task-Technology Fit (TTF) as the base theory, and to examine the intention of farmers regarding continuous channel utilization. To empirically estimate the proposed Information-Channel-Fit (ICF) model, a survey questionnaire was constructed and 265 usable feedbacks were collected from Pakistani farmers, and data were analyzed by Partial Least Square Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). Obtained findings validated the whole model in reflecting the significant effect of information delivery characteristics and the ICT channel characteristics on Information-Channel-Fit, which further influences channel utilization for information delivered. Additionally, self-efficacy mediates the relationship between ICF and channel utilization, which means that farmer's attitude, experience, and skills enrich the degree of impact on ICT channel utilization. Education had a significant moderating effect on information delivery and self-efficacy for obtaining agricultural information. The findings and the proposed model of the study could help ICTs providers, policymakers, agriculture extension officers, and administrators to develop more beneficial strategies in addressing difficulties faced by farmers in utilizing ICT for information access. Consequently, a further line of inquiry could be to collect data from those developing countries where farmers have the best strategies in place for the utilization of ICT channels. Similarly, the pilot programs need to be evaluated in developing countries, which not only evaluate the causal impact but also its mechanisms.