Assessment of public extension personnel’s capabilities and use of electronic sources for extension service delivery in Kwara State
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Date
2021-12
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Publisher
Journal of Sustainable Development
Abstract
The study assessed public extension personnel’s capabilities and use of electronic sources for extension
service delivery in Kwara state, Nigeria. All (125) public extension personnel in the state main extension
agency were used for the study. This comprises 17, 40, 33 and 35 extension personnel from zones A, B, C
and D of the state, respectively. Structured questionnaire was used for primary data collection,
complemented by key informant interview. Data collected were analysed using descriptive statistics,
such as frequency count, percentages, mean and standard deviation while correlation matrix and
principal component (factor) analysis were used for inferential deductions. Information elicited from the
key informant interview were used to corroborate the quantitative findings. The extension personnel had
basic foundational education and deemed literate enough to make use of electronic resources. They
possessed good technical knowledge and skills to make use of electronic resources for accessing and
disseminating agricultural information. There was increasing use of electronic resources among public
extension personnel within the agricultural sector, owing to continuous proliferation of digital literacy
and pervasiveness of electronic gadgets, globally, Nigeria inclusive. More knowledgeable personnel had
better perception about benefits of e-resources, and equally encountered more constraints using them.
The principal component analysis yielded five main constraints’ categories associated with use of
electronic resources among the extension personnel namely ‘psychomotor’, ‘cognitive related’ and
‘internet related’ factors, in order of their contribution to total percent variation. Others were
‘infrastructure related’ and ‘affective’ factors, respectively.
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