Abstract:
Customer satisfaction is the most important element
for developing and sustaining
organizational priorities and practices. Thus, we e
xamined farmers’ overall satisfaction
with agricultural extension services and its determ
inants using data collected from 150
beneficiary farmers in North West Ethiopia. The fin
dings show that about 55 percentage
of the interviewees were satisfied whereas 45 perce
ntage of them were dissatisfied with the
extension services, implying that the program still
has a lot of room for improvement. The
empirical result based on ordered logit model revea
led that perceived economic return,
regular extension contact, family size and off-farm
income were driving factors for
farmers’ satisfaction. On the other hand, limited t
echnology choices, high price of inputs,
inconvenient loan system and undefined boundary bet
ween the extension services and the
local politics were among the reasons given by diss
atisfied farmers. Thus, from a policy
perspective, the findings suggest a need to develop
demand-driven extension service
instead of the existing supply-driven one. Such ser
vice should be aiming to enhance the
rewards from farming in order to maintain participa
tion and farmers` satisfaction, which
influence the sustainability of the extension progr
am.
Keywords:
Agricultural extension service, Ethiopia, Farmers’
satisfaction, Ordered logit model
.
