Perception and adoption of new agricultural technologies in a Northern Inland Mozambique

The debate on the factors constraining the adoption of agricultural technologies in Southern African countries is still open. This paper assesses the perception and the level of adoption of a set of agricultural technologies by the key actors in a Northern Inland Mozambique. These key actors formed two groups: (1) Technicians, who are the local government officials and are responsible for the adoption of agricultural technologies in the area; (2) Extension farmers, who are local farmers, and leaders in different communities of the area; they work together with the technicians to prove new technologies and to promote them within the local farmer’s communities. The data was collected through surveys with 10 technicians (20% women) and 8 extension farmers (37.5% women), assessing their perception of the adoption of agricultural technologies in Chitima, Mozambique between 2012 and 2017. Results show that technicians declare seed varieties as the easily adopted technology by the farmers, but the extension farmers declared that they do not care about the type of technology as long as it increases the crop yield and the income. This reflects a misunderstanding between technicians and extension farmers that could be constraining the adoption of agricultural technologies in Chitima. Van Meensel et al. (2012). First, an open meeting was conducted with the Government Agriculture Office‟s staff in order to determine who are the key actors in Chitima that should be interviewed in technology adoption matters. We opted for two types of key actors: technicians and extension farmers. Technicians are the workers of the Government Agriculture Office and are the responsible for every technology adoption process related to agriculture in Chitima area; they operate directly with the second key actor, the extension farmers, who are local farmers who have common characteristics such as community leadership and high level of technology adoption; and their operational role is to prove every agriculture technology provided by the technicians, and if it works, extension farmers promote it within their communities. To survey these two key actors, a 7 open and 6 closed question questionnaires were designed in Portuguese for technicians and a 7 open and 6 closed open question questionnaires for extension farmers, and in this case a Portuguese-Nyungwe (local language) interpreter was used. Both questionnaires were designed to last 10 to 12 min. The survey addressed the perception of the key actors on the adoption of agricultural technologies in the area between 2012 and 2017. Every interviewee signed an Informed Consent. Qualitative data collection was conducted according to Nigatu (2009): (1) sampling: open ended questionnaires; (2) tools: observation and interactive interviews. Quantitative data collection was conducted through closed questionnaires. The questionnaires were transcribed word by word, and the qualitative and quantitative data were organized in summaries. Analysis method was deductive approach for qualitative data; measures of central tendency were mean, median, and mode; and measures of variability like standard deviation for quantitative data was used.