Assessment of the use of Rural Radio as an Agricultural Information Dissemination Tool among Rural Farmers in Dekina Local Government of Kogi State, Nigeria.

ABSTRACT The study assessed the use of rural radio as agricultural information dissemination tool among farmers in Dekina Local Government Area of Kogi State. The specific objectives were to: describe the socio-economic characteristics of the respondents, identify rural and agricultural programmes normally aired on radio, find out the level of patronage of the programmes, identify the convenience of the time of presentation to the target audience, identify the necessity for rural radio among the rural farmers, identify the problems militating against the listening audience of the rural radio. A 3 – stage sampling technique was used to randomly select 150 respondents for this study, using a well structured questionnaire. The data collected were analyzed using descriptive statistics. Results of the finding shows that majority of the respondents listened more to their traditional programmes on daily basis. The major constraints to the respondent’s listenership of the radio programmes were language barrier and lack of feedback amongst others. It was recommended that agricultural and rural development information be coded in the form of traditional/local music or incorporated into the traditional music to arouse the interests of the target audience and move to take actions and that research messages should be translated into the simplest language possible and translated to the prevalent languages.