The agrarian sector, as the key source of livelihood in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), has become highly vulnerable to changes in extension service deliveries. Limited access to technical advice, financial loans and farming input mixed with environmental challenges require an understanding of how multi-functional actor relationships determine agricultural knowledge and exchange of information. This study contributes to filling this gap by characterizing horizontal and vertical interactions. By applying a social network analysis, we mapped actor relations along public-private-community co-operations to provide insights into structural dependencies at different administrative levels. Related to three sites distributed over Burkina Faso and Ghana, local perceptions were collected in stakeholder workshops to generate social network narratives. These narratives were analyzed by various metrics to identify patterns of partnerships and key actors. Study results reveal for Burkina Faso a slight shared network topology, while both sites in Ghana reflect a top-down flow of knowledge and information. The statistical findings indicate that agricultural extension services are primarily delivered to farmers through a few key actors such as NGOs and farm-based organizations/ cooperatives. Especially at the community level, the results show many reciprocal links between farmers, business actors and NGOs. This highlights a shift toward a pluralistic agricultural extension service system and underpins the demand for policies to support the long-term viability of these actors, in particular for regions where public extension agents are under-represented.
Schultze et al. (2025) studied this question.