Target Agencies’ Awareness and Implementation Of Universities’ Agriculture-Based

Abstract

ABSTRACT

Nigeria is blessed with talented, intelligent and scholarly lecturers in all areas of agriculture. They have been conducting significant researches and coming up with appropriate recommendations as well as fashioning out good agricultural polices to address food production problems. In spite of this, Nigeria is still not self-sufficient in food production. One major phenomenon bordering around this problem that has not been deeply investigated is the awareness and implication of lecturers’ research recommendations by target agencies. This was the main aim of the study. Fifty key research recommendations by 50 lecturers in the departments of agricultural economics and agricultural extension at the University of Ibadan, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife and University of Agriculture, Abeokuta were investigate. Results indicated very low levels of awareness and implication of the recommendations by the target agencies. The agencies were aware of only 20% of the 50 recommendations some of the problems causing this trend are lack of concern by the lecturers (as all that matter is the publication for promotion purposes) (96%), lack of research sponsorship grant (94%), poor and non-functional linkage mechanism (90%). The study recommended a more effective linkage between lecturer and target agencies, better funding of research, participatory research involving the target agencies and making a university unit responsible for communicating lecturers’ research recommendations to target agencies.