Adoption of IT for extension services in developing countries : practice and experience from the albanian case

Abstract

It seems the expectations that Information Technology (IT) could be adopted widely and rapidly by farmers and extensionists have slightly cooled recently. There is a wide range of possible explanations for the slow adoption rate. This paper discusses the adoption rate of Information Technology (IT) by extension services in a developing country such as Albania. We report practices and experiences from an ongoing research and development programme which is financially supported by the European Union (EU). One of the main objectives of this programme is to increase IT adoption rates and to set up information centers for “one stop” information shopping in different areas of Albania. Since this programme involves the largest public agricultural organisations (ministry of agriculture and food), the largest private associations in Albania as well as academia, we believe that experiences and practices reported here may be very useful to other researchers or extensionists.