This policy brief shows how digital tools can help to ensure that public money for agricul-tural extension is spent wisely. Governments often fund offices, training centers, and the salaries of extension officers, but cannot eas-ily review the impacts of these expenditures. This is because the activities of extension agents are not monitored systematically. Ex-ension services rarely generate quantitative data on the effects of their work.
Participatory research can improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and scope of research processes, and foster social inclusion, empowerment, and sustainability. Yet despite four decades of agricultural research institutions exploring and developing methods for participatory research, it has never become mainstream in the agricultural technology development cycle. Citizen science promises an innovative approach to participation in research, using the unique facilities of new digital technologies, but its potential in agricultural research participation has not been systematically probed.
Rapid climatic and socio-economic changes challenge current agricultural R&D capacity. The necessary quantum leap in knowledge generation should build on the innovation capacity of farmers themselves. A novel citizen science methodology, triadic comparisons of technologies or tricot, was implemented in pilot studies in India, East Africa, and Central America. The methodology involves distributing a pool of agricultural technologies in different combinations of three to individual farmers who observe these technologies under farm conditions and compare their performance.