Unravelling technology-acceptance factors influencing farmer use of banana tissue culture planting materials in Central Uganda

Effective management of plant health is fundamental for food and income security to meet the growing demands of local and global markets. This however requires farmers’ adequate access to quality planting materials under the prevailing contextual and psycho-social factors. This study, anchored in the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technologies, unravels technology-acceptance factors that influence farmers’ intentions to use banana tissue culture planting materials in the control of Banana Xanthomonas Wilt. Data were collected from 248 randomly sampled banana farmers using a structured questionnaire and analyzed using structural equation modelling to examine hypothesized paths in the uptake of banana tissue culture planting materials. Results show that farmer intentions to use tissue culture planting materials are dependent on two constructs: social influence and farmer innovativeness. However, social influence is the main predictor of intentions to use tissue culture planting materials. In particular, farmer innovativeness mediates facilitating conditions and social influence in predicting intentions to use tissue culture planting materials. Thus, this study reveals two factors that influence farmer intentions to use tissue culture planting materials: social influence and farmer innovativeness. The findings imply that social influence and farmer innovativeness are critical in disseminating novel agricultural technologies in Uganda and elsewhere

Assessing the capacity for effective multi-stakeholder participation in innovation platforms: The case of Research-Into-Use Project in Rwanda

Innovation Platforms (IPs) are gaining popularity as a practical approach to operationalizing Agricultural Innovation Systems (AIS) thinking to accelerate agricultural development and poverty eradication particularly in developing countries. The strength of IPs lies in the multi-stakeholder interactions to learn together and co-create knowledge and innovations in the agricultural value chains. Multi-stakeholder interactions are characterized by power relations and influence requiring individual actors to deploy their social and communicative competences to utilize the space provided by IPs to influence benefits from their engagement. In current practice, IPs focus on creating space for multi-stakeholder interaction and little attention is given to building the essential competences for stakeholder groups to take advantage of the opportunities in IPs. Using a case of IPs initiated by the Research-Into-Use (RIU) project in Rwanda, this paper identifies a range of competences required by various stakeholder groups and perceived priorities for capacity strengthening. All stakeholder groups recognize social and communicative competences as necessary to foster interaction in IPs, but downplay their need for capacity strengthening. Instead, they perceive technical competences such as utilizing technologies and business skills to be priority for capacity strengthening. This suggests that for IPs to be successful and sustainable, actors will need greater exposure to the importance of the social and communicative competences. This includes engagement of innovation brokers in training and exposure of actors to communicative skills to equitably gain from the IPs