Journal of Agricultural Extension (Dec 2005)
Three Decades of Adoption and Diffusion Research in Nigeria: Lessons and Prospects
Abstract
Adoption of innovations is critical to the process of change in human societies. In Nigeria, the earliest adoption studies were conducted around 1970. The advent and proliferation of World Bank supported Agricultural Development Programmes (ADPs) in the 1980s however spurred offseveral adoption and diffusion studies, many of which are reviewed in this paper. The analysis showed that socio-economic factors are the most commonly considered variables in adoption studies in Nigeria. Several studies in the 1980s measured adoption rates of innovations, determinedfactors influencing adoption and identified differences in the characteristics of different client groups. By the 1990s, other issues such as types of innovations easily adopted and the time-lag in innovation adoption anddiffusion were thefoci ofadoption anddiffusion research in Nigeria. Thefindings of this study suggest that there is some difficulty in data collection in the conduct of adoption and diffusion research in Nigeria. It therefore recommended the use of Geographic Information System (G1S) data in the study ofuptake of innovations by small farmers and standardization of scales for measuring several variables in adoption and diffusion research.
