EFFECTIVENESS OF CELL PHONE IN DISSEMINATING AGRITULTURAL INFORMATION AS PERCEIVED BY THE SAAOs

Abstract

The main purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of cell phone in disseminating agricultural information and to explore the contribution of the factors of the SAAOs on their effectiveness of cell Phone. The selected characteristics were age, length of job experience, extent of using cell phone, farmers coverage by SAAO, training received on ICT and Agriculture, complexity of using cell phone, income beyond Job and Effectiveness of cell Phone. Data were gathered from 79 SAAOs of three upazilas namely Kushtia Sadar, Bheramara and Mirpur under Kushtia district by using personal interview schedule during the period from 25 March to 20 May, 2019.The Findings revealed that 60.8 percent of the respondents had medium effective, while 16.4 percent and 22.8 percent of them respectively found it as highly and less effective as a medium for disseminating agricultural information. Multiple regression analysis showed that extent of using cell phone and farmers coverage by SAAO had significant positive contribution and complexity of using cell phone had significant negative contribution to the effectiveness of cell phone in disseminating of agricultural information as perceived by the SAAOs variety while rest of the variables showed no significant contribution to the effectiveness of cell phone. Complexity faced Index (CFI) in using cell phone, it was observed that “video call” ranked first complexity followed by “SMS/MMS” and “Voice call”