The research team, led by Enoch Kwame Tham-Agyekum of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology and the University of Pretoria, set out to answer a deceptively simple question: who actually gets access to climate information broadcast over community radio, and who is left out? Rather than treating access as a yes-or-no matter of owning a radio, the researchers conceptualized it as a four-dimensional construct spanning physical, socio-cultural, economic, and institutional or policy-related accessibility. This framework allowed them to disentangle the many ways a farmer can be cut off from the airwaves, from missing batteries and bad roads to gender norms that keep women away from listening groups.

The scale of the study is notable. Working from an estimated population of roughly 870,000 smallholder farmers across the Northern, Upper East, Upper West, Savannah, and North East regions, the team surveyed 1,200 farmers, more than three times the minimum sample size required for statistical reliability at a 95 percent confidence level. Respondents were selected through multi-stage sampling, with regions, radio stations, and communities chosen purposively for their climate vulnerability and active broadcasting, and individual farmers drawn randomly in proportion to each region’s farming population. The survey data were then complemented by interviews with 25 key informants, including agricultural extension agents, religious and traditional leaders, community leaders, and NGO representatives.

What the researchers found first was how deeply community radio is woven into daily agricultural life. More than 58 percent of farmers reported listening to climate-related broadcasts every day, and another 24.5 percent tuned in weekly. Only about 6 percent never listened at all. Most farmers used their own radio sets, at 44.25 percent, or mobile phones, at 37.83 percent, while roughly one in five relied on neighbors’ radios or communal listening groups. The interviews revealed that these shared devices matter enormously in remote areas, where farmers gather to hear a forecast and immediately discuss what it means for planting dates.

The content itself proved far richer than simple weather reports. Key informants described broadcasts covering seasonal forecasts, rainfall warnings, planting-date guidance, crop diversification, drought-resistant seed varieties, soil management, post-harvest storage, livestock care during dry spells, and even market prices during drought. The authors characterize community radio as an integrated climate information system, one that combines early warning, advisory services, indigenous knowledge such as traditional signs of changing weather, and market intelligence across the entire agricultural value chain. In a region where formal extension services are often understaffed and unable to reach remote communities, this makes radio a lifeline for climate-smart decision-making.

But the study’s most striking findings concern the patterns of exclusion hiding inside those impressive listenership numbers. Using a Multivariate Probit model, which allowed the researchers to estimate the four access dimensions simultaneously while accounting for correlations among them, the team identified clear socio-economic fault lines. Gender emerged as a powerful determinant: being female was associated with significantly lower physical, economic, and institutional accessibility, with the physical dimension significant at the p < 0.01 level and the economic and institutional dimensions at p < 0.05. The authors attribute this to mobility constraints, domestic responsibilities, and lower device ownership among women, citing comparative evidence from Benin where 67 percent of women rice processors owned a radio set compared with 87 percent of men.

Household size told a similar story. Farmers from larger households, which in this sample averaged about nine members, experienced significantly lower physical, economic, and institutional accessibility, all at p < 0.01. The explanation is partly economic: a single radio set shared among many family members limits individual access, and the time and resource pressures of feeding a large household squeeze out the costs of batteries, charging, and participation in information networks. Extension access, by contrast, was the strongest positive predictor, significantly boosting physical, economic, and institutional accessibility, confirming that farmers already connected to agricultural extension agents are far more likely to benefit from radio-linked institutional programming. Higher monthly income also improved accessibility across three dimensions.

One result defied expectations: access to formal credit was negatively associated with all four dimensions of accessibility at p < 0.01. The researchers offer several plausible explanations rather than a definitive one. Farmers with credit may rely on alternative, more personalized information channels such as extension personnel, input suppliers, or mobile-based services, making community radio relatively less important to them. Credit obligations may also reshape how farmers allocate their time, pulling them away from community-based information channels. Whatever the mechanism, the finding underscores that financial resources alone do not guarantee engagement with agricultural knowledge systems, particularly where coordination between financial institutions and extension services remains weak.

The perception indices added texture to the statistical picture. Physical accessibility scored highest in farmers’ estimations at 3.69 on a five-point scale, with station locations and broadcast schedules well aligned to farming routines, though rainy-season roads and patchy signals in interior communities posed real problems. Institutional and policy accessibility followed at 3.75, buoyed by strong collaboration between extension agents and radio stations, which scored 4.31, but dragged down by weak NGO support and inconsistent alignment with government agricultural policy. Socio-cultural accessibility scored 3.60, with farmers praising local-language broadcasts that make complex forecasts understandable, yet noting that chiefs and elders, the community’s most trusted voices, are too rarely involved on air. Economic accessibility was the weakest dimension at 3.50, with informants reporting that even small costs become prohibitive during the lean season and that some households lack reliable radios or batteries altogether.

The study’s recommendations are as concrete as its diagnosis. The authors call for gender-responsive listening groups supported with solar-powered radios for women, broadcast schedules aligned with women’s domestic and farming responsibilities, and formal integration of traditional leaders into climate programming to build trust and message acceptance. They propose targeted subsidies or cost-sharing schemes to boost radio ownership among credit-constrained and large-household farmers, multi-stakeholder content committees to improve the technical depth and policy alignment of broadcasts, and integration of radio with mobile-phone services such as SMS alerts and call-in platforms. Each proposal comes with honest caveats about funding sustainability, network coverage, and digital literacy gaps. The broader lesson reaches beyond Ghana: as climate change intensifies pressure on rain-fed agriculture across the Sahel and beyond, the channels that deliver life-saving forecasts are only as effective as their weakest link, and ensuring that women, the poor, and the marginalized can actually hear the message may matter as much as the accuracy of the forecast itself.

Subject of Research: Inclusion and exclusion in climate information access through community radio among smallholder farmers in Northern Ghana

Article Title: Patterns of inclusion and exclusion in climate information access through community radio among smallholder farmers in Northern Ghana

Article References: Tham-Agyekum, E. K., Nimoh, F., Assani, A. S., Maramura, T. C., Cheboi, J. J., Wainaina, R. W., & Bakang, J.-E. A. (2026). Patterns of inclusion and exclusion in climate information access through community radio among smallholder farmers in Northern Ghana. Discover Agriculture, 4(1), Article 310. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44279-026-00792-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44279-026-00792-0

Keywords: community radio, climate information, smallholder farmers, Northern Ghana, climate adaptation, gender inequality, agricultural extension, information accessibility, rain-fed agriculture, climate resilience, mobile phones, rural communication

The research team, led by Edward Afum Banahene and Enoch Kwame Tham-Agyekum of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, with collaborators at the University of Pretoria, Mwalimu Julius K. Nyerere University of Agriculture and Technology, the University of Cape Coast, and the Malawi University of Science and Technology, set out to answer a deceptively simple question: which communication channels actually move farmers from awareness to action? Climate variability in Ghana—erratic rainfall, prolonged dry spells, and progressive soil degradation—continues to undermine agricultural productivity and food security. Climate-resilient agricultural practices, ranging from drought-tolerant and early-maturing crop varieties to intercropping, conservation tillage, agroforestry, organic manure application, rainwater harvesting, cover cropping, and the use of weather forecasts, have been promoted for years. Yet adoption remains low and inconsistent, despite growing policy support.

The researchers argue that the bottleneck is not the existence of technologies but the communication mechanisms that carry knowledge of them. Farmers must be aware of a practice, understand how it works, and trust the source before they will implement it. Drawing on Diffusion of Innovations theory and the framework of Agricultural Knowledge and Information Systems, the team compared multiple pathways within a single analytical framework: face-to-face extension, community radio, digital platforms and social media, mobile-based services, cooperatives and farmer organizations, peer learning networks, farmer field schools, demonstration plots, agricultural shows, participatory video, community theater, and village knowledge-sharing platforms. Crucially, they combined farmers’ perceptions of trust, accessibility, credibility, and convenience with measurable behavioral outcomes, and used multivariate statistics to control for socio-economic factors such as education, gender, farm size, income, and extension contact.

Methodologically, the study employed a descriptive, quantitative design. From a population of roughly 40,000 smallholder farmers in the municipality, a sample of 396 was drawn using Yamane’s formula at a 95 percent confidence level and a 5 percent margin of error. Two-stage sampling first purposively identified communities cultivating climate-sensitive crops, then randomly selected farmers from lists supplied by the Ministry of Agriculture and farmer-based organizations. Structured questionnaires with Likert-scale items were administered face-to-face in December 2025, with reliability confirmed by Cronbach’s alpha values between 0.78 and 0.81 across the constructs of accessibility, relevance, effectiveness, and trust. Ethical clearance was granted by KNUST’s Humanities and Social Sciences Research Ethics Committee, and participation was voluntary and anonymized.

The results paint a vivid picture of a communication landscape in which social embeddedness trumps broadcast reach. Cooperatives and farmer organizations emerged as the most frequently used pathway, with a mean usage score of 3.92 on a five-point scale, followed closely by community radio (3.77), digital platforms and social media (3.73), peer learning networks (3.73), and farmer-to-farmer communication (3.60). But frequency of use is not the same as influence. Spearman rank correlation analysis revealed that peer learning networks and farmer-to-farmer communication exhibited the strongest positive and statistically significant associations with nearly every climate-resilient practice measured. Peer learning networks correlated at 0.756 with intercropping, 0.714 with conservation tillage, 0.523 with organic manure application, and 0.479 with the use of climate information. Farmer-to-farmer communication showed similarly strong associations with intercropping (0.630), conservation tillage (0.606), mulching (0.565), and cover cropping (0.440).

These correlations, the authors argue, reflect the mechanics of social learning. Peer exchange allows direct observation of outcomes, experimentation, and feedback, reducing the uncertainty that surrounds new practices. Trust, shared norms, and cumulative experience shape decision-making in ways that one-way broadcasts cannot. Climate-resilient farming, in this view, is not a solitary undertaking but a collective one, embedded in social systems. Extension strategies that institutionalize peer-based learning—lead farmers, farmer champions, group-based experimentation—are therefore more likely to achieve sustainable and scalable resilience than top-down information delivery.

The study’s regression analysis added a socio-economic dimension. Farmer group membership significantly predicted the use of agricultural shows and exhibitions (β = 0.315, p < 0.05), community theater (β = 0.338, p < 0.05), and participatory video (β = 0.423, p < 0.05), suggesting that organized groups act as gateways to collective, experiential communication formats. Engagement in off-farm income activities significantly predicted farmer-to-farmer communication (β = 0.309, p < 0.05), indicating that time-constrained farmers gravitate toward fast, trusted peer exchanges rather than formal training sessions. Intriguingly, education, age, gender, farm size, and income were largely insignificant predictors of pathway use, hinting that in this setting, social dynamics matter more than individual human capital. A possible substitution effect also surfaced: farmers with frequent extension contact showed marginally lower use of community radio and digital media, suggesting imperfect integration between formal and informal information systems.

Not every finding flattered conventional wisdom. Farmer field schools and demonstration plots—long staples of agricultural extension—displayed significant negative correlations with adoption, including −0.327 for intercropping and −0.297 for conservation tillage. The authors attribute this to poor contextualization, infrequent delivery, didactic teaching styles, and time lags before benefits materialize. NGO and donor-funded groups showed weak negative effects, and climate adaptation networks were largely ineffective, likely lacking visibility, structure, and sustained engagement. Community radio, digital and social media, and participatory video showed low or insignificant correlations with actual adoption, reinforcing the argument that while mass media excels at awareness creation, it lacks the interactivity and specificity required for behavioral change. Mobile-based services occupied a middle ground, with moderate but consistent positive correlations, particularly with drought-tolerant varieties (0.161) and climate information use (0.212), positioning them as valuable tools for the knowledge and early decision stages of adoption.

Perception data reinforced the hierarchy of trust. Extension officers were the most trusted information actors (mean 4.25), followed by farmer networks and cooperatives (3.84), while trust in mobile applications (3.02) and social media (3.22) remained moderate—evidence that exposure does not automatically breed confidence. Farmers rated information clarity highly (4.05) and peer-to-peer interaction as especially effective for knowledge transfer (4.07), but field demonstrations (2.01) and climate adaptation networks (1.96) scored lowest, pointing to weak institutional embedding rather than intrinsic ineffectiveness. The study also identified barriers to adoption using Kendall’s coefficient of concordance, which confirmed significant consensus among respondents. Risk aversion and fear of yield loss ranked as the most critical constraint (mean rank 3.66), followed by lack of access to accurate and timely climate information, low education and technical knowledge, labor and financial constraints, distrust in information sources, and land tenure insecurity. Notably, language barriers ranked least significant, suggesting that most information in Techiman is already delivered in familiar local dialects.

The implications extend well beyond Ghana. The authors recommend scaling peer learning platforms, integrating timely and localized climate information into channels farmers already trust, developing visual, stepwise communication materials, providing financial and labor support mechanisms such as collective labor schemes and staggered input repayment, and delivering advice through credible local actors including opinion leaders and farmer representatives. They caution that the cross-sectional design limits causal inference and that self-reported data may carry recall and social desirability bias. Still, the central message is clear and potentially transformative for adaptation policy across Africa: psychological and informational barriers outweigh structural ones, and the most powerful communication technology in climate-smart agriculture may not be a smartphone or a radio transmitter at all, but the trusted voice of a fellow farmer standing at the edge of a demonstration field, describing what actually worked.

Subject of Research: The relationship between communication pathways and smallholder farmers' adoption of climate-resilient agricultural practices in Techiman Municipality, Ghana.

Article Title: Talking climate, growing change: communication pathways and farmer adoption of resilient practices in Techiman, Ghana

Article References: Talking climate, growing change: communication pathways and farmer adoption of resilient practices in Techiman, Ghana. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-026-01136-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13412-026-01136-6

Keywords: climate-resilient agriculture, communication pathways, smallholder farmers, peer learning, Ghana, adoption, agricultural extension, climate information, farmer organizations, diffusion of innovations, Techiman, risk aversion