Modernizing Extension and Advisory Services
Modernizing Extension and Advisory Services (MEAS), a $9.5M AgReach project funded by USAID, was active from 2010-2016. Overall, the MEAS project contributed to significant impacts on extension systems, organizations, individual actors, and farmers while increasing the prominence of extension on the international agricultural development and food security agenda.
Over 60 institutions and programs are using MEAS training modules and manuals and MEAS materials have been accessed online on over 270,000 times. MEAS focused its efforts on the organizations that served them through the analysis, design, evaluation, and reform of rural extension and advisory services, collaborating with public systems/governments, donor funded projects, NGOs, public sector entities, farmers’ unions, and civil society organizations. In total, the MEAS project used this approach to reach over 11 million farmers.
Though no longer active as a project, related and subsequent AgReach projects have built off of MEAS's foundations. All MEAS publications, extension tools, learning modules, and the rest of the resource library are available for public use at meas.illinois.edu.
The publications below represent a sampling of the MEAS library, click to find more:
- Climate change adaptation guides
- Region-specific field extension manuals
- SMART Skills training modules
- Series on teaching and learning for extension practitioners
- Farmer-to-farmer extension
- Designing ICT-supported extension
Academic and Discussion Papers
- Social factors in ICT use in extension
- Designing EAS to reduce post-harvest loss
- Reducing the gender gap in EAS
- ICT in extension and advisory services
- Linking farmers to market M&E in extension
- Farmer-to-farmer extension approaches
- Public-private extension collaborations
- Small farm resource centers
- Reaching rural women
- Human resource development in EAS
