evidoria

← Back to browse

Good practice Imported

Digital Green's Video-Mediated Extension — Farmer-to-Farmer Video Learning Across Rural Ethiopia

Ethiopia · Addis Ababa · See the Ethiopia profile · See the Addis Ababa profile

Evidence: Randomised controlled trial Top 74% 57/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

A two-year cluster-randomised trial across 2,345 Ethiopian households found that supplementing government extension agents with locally filmed instructional videos raised farming-technique adoption by 6-7 percentage points, though crop yields did not rise.

6 percentage points
Technology adoption increase, year 1 (year 1)
7 percentage points
Technology adoption increase, year 2 (year 2)
17 percentage points
Increase in reported Development Agent contact
438,488 farmers
Farmers reached nationally (self-reported scale-up)

Details

Maturity
Scaling
Promoter
Digital Green, with Ethiopia's Ministry of Agriculture; evaluated by J-PAL
Period
2017-2019
Keywords
agriculture, extension services, ICT4D, knowledge diffusion

Context

Digital Green partners with Ethiopia's Ministry of Agriculture to supplement in-person extension work with short, locally filmed instructional videos (10-15 minutes) on specific farming practices such as row planting, precise seed spacing, and urea top-dressing. Government Development Agents (DAs) screen the videos to farmer groups alongside their normal extension visits.

Activities

A two-year cluster-randomised controlled trial run with J-PAL covered 2,345 households across 342 kebeles in 30 woredas in Amhara, Oromia, SNNP and Tigray.

Results

Video-mediated groups were 6 percentage points more likely to adopt at least one of the three target technologies in year one (from a 64% base) and 7 points more likely in year two. Farmers in video groups were also 17 percentage points more likely to report direct contact with a Development Agent. Despite the adoption gains, self-reported crop yields did not increase. A parallel arm inviting farmers' spouses to viewings improved women's knowledge scores but produced no additional adoption, since male household heads retained the final planting decision.

Conclusions

Digital Green reports the model has since been scaled to reach 438,488 farmers with 1,236 videos nationally, though this scale-up figure is self-reported by the implementing organisation rather than independently audited.

Implementation
Indicative cost
Low (< €50k)
Time to results
Medium (1–3 years)
Staffing & skills
Digital Green, Ethiopia's Ministry of Agriculture (Development Agents), J-PAL (evaluator)

Conditions for success

  • videos filmed locally with local presenters and languages to match existing peer-learning norms
  • screened by government Development Agents alongside normal extension visits

Common failure modes

  • no significant increase in self-reported crop yields despite adoption gains
  • spouse-inclusion arm raised women's knowledge but not adoption, since male household heads retained the final planting decision

Commonly funded by

National / regional programmes Philanthropic / foundation funding

Indicative funding routes for practices of this type — always check each programme's current calls and eligibility rules.

Replication kit

Reusable artefacts from this practice — as published by their sources.

Do you run this practice? Claim it — verified implementers get a public contact pathway and can propose corrections.

Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

Similar practices you may find useful