Talking Books — Icon-and-Audio Devices Bringing Agricultural Extension to Low-Literacy Women Farmers in Ghana's Upper West Region

The Talking Book is a simple, low-cost audio player designed by Amplio (formerly Literacy Bridge) through participatory design with rural communities where functional literacy is low — it uses icon-based buttons rather than text and lets users play, pause and repeat pre-recorded messages in their own dialect, addressing a barrier that text-based extension materials and SMS services cannot reach.
Between 2013 and 2019, Mennonite Economic Development Associates (MEDA) integrated Talking Books into its Greater Rural Opportunities for Women (GROW) project, distributing devices loaded with agronomic advice on soybean cultivation to 662 women's Village Savings and Loan Association groups across 190 communities in 11 districts of Ghana's Upper West Region, reaching more than 23,000 women farmers by 2018.
MEDA and Amplio report that participating farmers adopted recommended practices such as bulk selling and price comparison, and that GROW farmers won district-level Ghana Farmer's Day awards; however, the organisations' published materials describe these as programme monitoring and case-study findings rather than an independently audited impact evaluation, and headline health-behaviour figures attributed to a UNICEF study in secondary coverage could not be traced to a public primary source and are therefore not included here.

Read the full analysis: https://www.meda.org/projects/grow/