Farmers’ Satisfaction with Agricultural Extension S ervice and Its Influencing Factors: A Case Study in North West Ethiopia

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 .