Food systems around the world face growing challenges. They must be transformed to sustainably feed a growing global population and made more resilient to shocks from extreme weather to conflict. Efforts on those fronts are increasingly interlinked—and depend on well-targeted local interventions.
Those in turn will depend on effective national extension services operating on the ground with farmers. Unfortunately, rural extension services face an array of problems that limit their potential role in food systems transformation. They face reduced budgets and have generally weak technical and functional capacities, soft skills, and poor coordination. They lack strong ties to research sources and institutions (Davis et al, 2020; Jayne et al, 2023; Ledermann et al, 2024; FAO, 2021; Dhital, 2017). Many national FAS policies and documents don’t even explicitly mention extension services.