CAPACITY OF THE SUB-ASSISTANT AGRICULTURE OFFICERS (SAAOs) OF GAZIPUR DISTRICT

Abstract

The current study was primarily intended to examine the capacity of the Sub Assistant Agriculture Officers (SAAOs) of the Department of Agricultural Extension (DAE) and to determine the correlations between each of the SAAOs selected characteristics and their capacity. Age, academic achievement, service length, job facilities, mass media contact, and farmers' problem awareness were the selected characteristics of the SAAOs. All the five upazilas of Gazipur district were chosen as the locale of the study and data were collected from 98 SAAOs, of those five upazilas. The data were gathered by the researcher himself through personal contact with a wellstructured

interview schedule. The capacity of the SAAOs was assessed by their respective supervisor (AEO) and three farmers from the relevant block of the concerned SAAOs. Finally, capacity of a SAAO was finally measured by the average of supervisor and farmers’ rating. Majority (56.1%) of the SAAOs had medium capacity and 33.7% and 10.2% had low and high capacity. Thus, overwhelming majority (89.8%) of the SAAOs had low to medium capacity to perform their duties. From spearman’s rank correlation, it was found that there were significant correlation between service length, job facilities, mass media contact and farmers’ problem awareness of the SAAOs with their capacity. From the findings, it may be concluded that SAAOs having more service length, job facilities, mass media contact and farmers’ problem awareness had more capacity to provide necessary agricultural advisory services to the farmers.