CAN THE ICT-BASED EXTENSION APPROACH BE AN ALTERNATIVE TO CONVENTIONAL EXTENSION METHODS?

Agricultural extension is the backbone of rural development and enhancing farmers' livelihood through improving crop productivity and raising food security level, most farmers and smallholders live in developing areas and are in most sites and cases deprived of modern agricultural techniques and practices, extension services, and other important supplementary agricultural services required to achieve rural sustainable development goals.  Agricultural extension workers are seeking to make rural communities a better place by providing them with related information at a suitable time by using many tools, applications of communications, and extension teaching methods to influence farmers' behaviors and make a positive impact by listening, interest, and being aware, to creating the need to change and having a clear vision to adopt new technologies. Extension services will remain the main gateway to help smallholder farmers, who represent the cornerstone of sustainable agricultural development in such developing areas. Many extension approaches have been adopted and implemented over the last decades, some described as traditional and others as modern like the ICT apps-based extension approach known as an electronic extension. Extension teaching activities should depend on multimedia to effectively guide technological and social change processes to achieve development purposes. However, not all approaches are suitable for all nations, communities, situations, purposes, technologies, changes, users, stages of decision-making, and adoption. An argument has been noted about the capability of the ICTs-based extension approach to replace the other conventional methods completely. The current paper discusses that to answer the asked question.