The Infomediary Campaign in the Philippines as a strategy to alleviate information poverty

This chapter is about the Infomediary Campaign in the Philippines, a strategy to mobilize young people in agriculture and to alleviate information poverty in remote rice-farming communities. It reflects on how information and communications technology (ICTs) and some offline means can converge to address information poverty, and thereby contribute to positive social change. Social change in this chapter is operationalized as moving from a period of information scarcity to one with additional communication pathways to alleviate information poverty. Surveys, interviews, and content analyses were used in data collection. This chapter combines Stakeholder Theory and the Livelihoods Approach to better unpack the results of this research. Key ingredients for upscaling the Campaign are identified. The strengths and weaknesses of using the combined approach are discussed

Young allies of agricultural extension: the Infomediary Campaign in Aurora, Philippines

There is a dearth of literature on how to engage the youth in agriculture as opposed to the innumerable of work probing into their massive migration away from the farm. While scholars have excessively examined the problem on youth outmigration from rural areas, little has been said about keeping them engaged. This paper addresses how young people can be engaged in agriculture using insights from the "Sagot ko ang magulang ko! Isang kampanya upang hikayatin ang mga kabataang maging infomediaries" (Read, Surf, and Text for your parents!: A campaign to mobilize the youth as infomediaries) project implementation in the Bayanihan and Ma. Aurora National High Schools in Aurora province. Infomediaries are people who facilitate access to information. Empirical data used in this study were drawn from field work, campaign cum research project, done in the two schools from April 2012 to March 2013. Participant observation, key informant interviews, focus group discussions, in-depth individual interviews, and survey were used in data collection. The Actor-Network Theory and the Capability Approach provided good lenses in analyzing and properly situating the campaign. A mix of online and offline initiatives, exposure and hands -on experience, and creative and motivational activities work in engaging young people. Study tours may help shape their minds to pursue agriculture in college. Issues on proficiency and access of young people to information and communications technology should be attended to. The school can serve as one nucleus of youth engagement in agriculture

Integrating climate-smart rice agriculture into secondary-level curriculum: lessons from three high schools in the Philippines

Climate change (CC) is an urgent and highly relevant topic that must be integrated into the school curriculum. Literature on CC integration, however, is scarce, let alone literature on integrating climate-smart rice agriculture (CSRA). Bringing CSRA lessons into the classroom means the chance is higher that climate-smart technologies on rice will reach even the most far-flung areas of the Philippines, which stand to be among the most vulnerable as regards the negative impacts of CC. This paper shares experiences drawn from three high schools in the Philippines on integrating CSRA into their curriculum. The research centers on appropriate teaching tools/strategies, push and exogenous factors in CSRA integration, and the types of information that are likely to be shared by the students with their farmer-parents or other farmers in their communities. Surveys among participating students (n = 155) and three focus group discussions among key school officials were conducted. Different teaching methods and/or tools were found to be generally useful in various contexts. Photos and videos, however, emerged as the most effective tools across sites. The livelihood source of the students does have a bearing on the complexity of messages that they can convey. Students from rice-farming households can competently discuss even highly complex adaptation and mitigation information with their farmer-parents or other farmers. Thorough message-framing is necessary to maximize student involvement as well as to increase production of education–entertainment (edutainment) materials to be utilized in teaching. This study, in general, contributes to CC education by bringing in best-fit practices in teaching tools and strategies to mobilize students to act on urgent matters relating to the impacts of CC. It also advises on considering exogenous factors that might affect CC education by taking into account those that are equally capable of shaping students’ perception and knowledge

Climate-Smart Agriculture: Do Young People Care?

This paper is about the information-seeking and information-sharing behavior on climate-smart agriculture (CSA) of high school students who participated in the Infomediary Campaign in 2014. This seeks to answer five research questions: (1) What are the indicators that searching and sharing of information by the infomediaries transpired? (2) What are the characteristics of infomediaries who are most likely to share information on CSA? (3) What sort of information can be competently shared by high school students? (4) How is information transferred from the information source (PhilRice) to the farmers? (5) What evidence suggests that information transferred was put to good use by the intended recipients? A survey (N=388) was conducted among eight randomly selected schools, from the pool of 108 schools, nationwide. Focus group discussions, individual interviews, and participant observation were likewise conducted. The Stakeholder Theory and Livelihoods Approach were combined to unpack the findings in this research. Results show that females are more likely to share information than males (p=.071). Land tenurial status (p=.430) and familial background (p=.052) do not seem to influence the information-seeking behavior of young people. Information that is easy to understand and reinforced elsewhere was shared often by students as compared with more complex ones. Several pathways were generated in documenting the infomediation process on CSA with the schools as the nucleus of agricultural information. These are: (1) PhilRice to farmers, (2) PhilRice to teachers to farmers, and (3) PhilRice to teachers to students to farmers