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Moderated conference on rural advisory services for family farms: 1-18 December 2014

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"Moderated conference on rural advisory services for family farms: 1-18 December 2014" <[log in to unmask]>
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This is Naser Zamani-Miandashti, assistant professor and chair of the Department of Agricultural Extension and Education, Shiraz University, Iran. 



Rural advisory service providers face many obstacles in providing advisory services for poor family farmers. Budget tightening is one of their main obstacles. Governments are reducing their support for public extension services, and private service providers have no choice but to focus on target groups who can pay for advisory services. Therefore, public institutions providing rural advisory services should mobilize all resources to improve outreach of their services. One of the resources which could be of real help in this regard is mobile messaging apps.



Mobile use has been increasing in the world. According to the International Telecommunication Union (2014), the number of mobile-cellular subscriptions worldwide is approaching the number of people on earth (7 billion). In developing countries, mobile cellular subscription will reach 90% by end 2014. More and more people are turning to mobile messaging apps, like Whatsapp, Viber, Hike, Line, WeChat, and Kakao Talk, to communicate and share information. Their main features are free messaging and voice calls between individuals or in groups. They make it more convenient and more fun for users to create and save chat groups and enable better sharing of images, videos and music. 



Now, I would like to share my experience in using mobile messaging apps for sharing agricultural entrepreneurship knowledge and information in Iran. I, along with one of my graduate students, have been moderating three virtual communities in recent months. These virtual communities are available through Viber and Whatsapp. More than 240 agricultural students and agricultural graduate entrepreneurs are sharing their knowledge and information in these communities. A small number of university professors and government agents are also participating in community processes. Some of the students who are members of these communities are family farm members and are taking advantage of this opportunity to provide their families with entrepreneurship knowledge and information available in these communities. We receive community members’ positive feedbacks and their interests in inviting their contacts to join the communities. Members are sharing agricultural knowledge and practical experiences. One government agent in our Viber community shared an interesting experience of using mobile messaging apps to encourage farmers to take part in a collective action against drought. 

 

To conclude, the reasons why I see many opportunities in using these apps for advisory services include: 

1) mobile messaging apps are already extremely popular, particularly among young generations in both urban and rural areas; 

2) the number of their users is mushrooming (I see the evidence in my smartphone showing new users from my contacts); 

3) the number of virtual communities available through these apps is growing rapidly; 

4) several new interesting features are being added to these apps; 

5) users feel comfortable with the apps having no time and place restrictions; 

6) these apps are available at no cost for every smartphone owner who has access to the Internet; 

7) their environment is interesting due to including text, audio, video and image. 



However, the main challenges which should be paid special attention for employing these apps in providing agricultural advisory services are the Internet costs, and low-speed and unstable internet connections in remote areas that impede users’ ability to make full advantage of the apps. To establish successful virtual communities using mobile messaging apps, members’ e-maturity and virtual community management skills should be improved in the target population.

 

Naser Zamani-Miandashti, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor and Chair

Dept. of Agricultural Extension & Education, 

Shiraz University, 

Iran

Zamanin58 (at) yahoo.com    



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