Agricultural Knowledge and Information Systems (AKIS)

The concept of AKIS was coined by Röling (1986). According to FAO and the World Bank (2000), "an Agricultural Knowledge and Information System links people and institutions to promote mutual learning and generate, share and utilize agriculture-related technology, knowledge and information. The system integrates farmers, agricultural educators, researchers and extensionists to harness knowledge and information from various sources for better farming and improved livelihoods."

 The AKIS/RD vision document is intended as a vehicle for sharing ideas and principles with the various stakeholders addressing the causes, and for seeking solutions for rural poverty. Operational guidelines, inspired by this shared vision and consistent with the principles outlined here, are under preparation by the World Bank and FAO.

The AKIS respond to technology, knowledge and information needs of farmers helping them in decision making and management of their farms. The basic assumption of this system is that information relevant for decision-making is generated by different actors and reaches farmers in many different ways. Quite often analysis of the AKIS shows that a role other than TOT is more appropriate. AKIS could involve providing farmers with a basket of opportunities and helping them to choose the right opportunity for their situation. Several analytical models have been developed to examine and assess AKIS.

It has been experienced by all concerned with the agricultural development process that a significant gap exists between technology generation and technology use at the field level. The dual concept of AKIS and synergy can fill this analytical gap. Within AKIS, farmers are in the central position. Farmers’ knowledge and skills are certainly an important complement to formal research and extension and such complementarities can be achieved through the institutional mechanism of AKIS. Farmers’ organizations also can play a valuable role in the process by formulating the information needs of their members and stimulating research institutes, extension services and other actors to provide this information. So, the articulated approach of AKIS is felt necessary to improve and sustain Indian Agriculture as well as to develop more effective relations with the world outside the farm, especially the markets.

An essential element in the AKIS concept is that it views agricultural research and extension as necessary but, by themselves, insufficient elements in complex innovation oriented institutional arrangements. The concept clarifies the distinction between agricultural research and extension, and innovation and technological change.

As Anderson (1997) has pointed out, it is not correct to attribute all the effects of technological change to agricultural research and extension. The focus in not on research or on extension per se, but on innovation and on the institutional arrangements that can favor it.

This is a sharp departure from the conventional view of innovation as a linear and rather mechanistic process that starts in highly skilled and specialized organizations (usually in the North) conducting basic and strategic research, and then moving down the line to applied research, adaptive research, technology transfer, extension and, finally, farmers as passive adopters of knowledge and information generated elsewhere.

As Röling and Jiggins (1998:304) have has recently put: 'It has become common practice to speak about 'agricultural knowledge systems', i.e., to use a (soft) systems approach for looking at the interaction among the (institutional) actors operating in a 'theatre of agricultural innovation'. Innovation emerges from this interaction and is no longer seen, as was customary in the 'transfer of technology perspective', as the end-of-pipe product of a sequential process. The knowledge system perspective looks at the institutional actors, within the arbitrary boundary of what can be considered the theatre of innovation, as potentially forming a soft system. A soft system is a social construct in the sense that it does not exist. One cannot, therefore, say that such actors as research, extension and farmers are a system. In all likelihood they are not, in that there is no synergy among their potentially complementary contributions to innovative performance, but by looking at them as potentially forming a soft system, one begins to explore the possibilities of facilitating their collaboration and hence the possibilities for enhancing their synergy and innovative performance'.

The World Bank - perhaps the largest agency in terms of supporting agricultural research, extension and development projects - in the 16 year period up to 1992, committed $ 3 billion to research and $ 2 billion to extension (Purcell and Anderson, 1997). By 2000, the World Bank had committed $ 5 billion each to agricultural research and extension projects1. Pardey and Alston (1995) report that in 1990 developing countries invested PPP $ 8.8 billion in agricultural research (much of it probably financed by multilateral loans such as those of the World Bank). With this kind of resources, an optimist gross estimation is that in that period agricultural research and development projects must have involved less than 10 million direct beneficiaries.