Barrier Analysis as a Tool to Inform Extension Activity Planning: Insights from Guatemala
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abstract
Over the past decade, renewed emphasis has been placed on extension services in developing countries to reduce rural poverty and improve food security. Despite this emphasis, complex physical, political, and socioeconomic environments in developing countries pose significant difficulties to extension agents success rates of adoption of new practices and/or behavior change among rural populations. In addition, agents have meager resources at their disposal. Development programs in the health sector have had success with employing behavior change theories for program design, driven by the Barrier Analysis as a method for gathering data about target populations. Theory and research suggest this method provides key information about why a target population might adopt new practices. If extension agents in developing countries such as Guatemala had access to such information, they might intentionally design interventions that lead to adoption. This paper provides an examination of examples from the field in Guatemala that illuminate ways in which extension agents can gain formative data that when analyzed, may shape how they encourage adoption of new practices. The implications of this paper suggest that using formative data gathering for planning interventions can lead to the behavior change extension agents and their governments seek.
