Rural Development And Agricultural Extension Administration In Nigeria

This paper reviewed the wide range of policies and approaches formulated and implemented to effect agricultural and rural development in Nigeria. The paper reveals that the common feature of all the strategies is the use of institutionalized agricultural extension service, devoted principally to augment smallholder productivity by promoting the adoption of new scientific farming practices. It shows that this approach have achieved limited success due to factors related to: their lethargic attitude towards decision making, inflexibility, over centralization, lack of appropriate technology and available supplies of production inputs, lack of trained manpower, wrong role perception and performance, inadequate coordination with research and training institutions, and lack of requisite logistic supports essential to extension success. It is the belief of this paper that total eradication of rural poverty in Nigeria through the use of extension approach will be achieved only when the role of extension is properly conceived and backed with adequate staffing, effective coordination with research centers and training institutions, provision of useful technologies and requisite physical inputs, adequate financing and proper recognition that extension system does not offer utopian solution to agricultural and rural modernization. It is only one of the numerous needed inputs, and that it's effect is in the nature of a catalytic ingredient of the modernization mix. Global Approaches to Extension Practice Vol.1(1) 2005: 31-4