This week a team of enumerators of the University Gadjah Mada has completed a four-week effort to collect endline data among farmers and extensions workers in five regencies in the Yogyakarta special region of Indonesia.
The LenteraDigiEx project assesses how an agricultural information platform, called “LenteraDesa” can be integrated into Government extension services. We randomized a two-sided training intervention to increase digital skills on both the demand and supply sides. While extension workers were trained to integrate the platform into their extension services, farmers were trained to use the information provided by the platform in their farm activities. We randomized two alternative types of training, one low-cost, which was offered entirely online, and one more intensive and more costly offering a blend of online and offline training. The intervention targeted “Millennial Farmers” (MFs), i.e., typically farmers below the age of 40 that the Government wants to attract to farming to counteract the aging of the agricultural sector.
We analyze the effect of the training interventions on the respondents' digital literacy, platform knowledge and use, extension workers' performance and capabilities, as well as farmers' adoption of practices and welfare, measured by agricultural productivity, sales, food security, and resilience.