Knowledge Management Practices, Challenges and Coping Strategies Adopted by Public Agricultural Extension: A Case of Nandi-Hills Sub-County, Nandi County, Kenya

Abstract

Aims: Knowledge Management (KM) in agriculture is a core aspect of agricultural productivity and profitability, but is one area with scanty literature. The aim of the current study was to determine the knowledge management practices, challenges and coping strategies adopted by public agricultural extension agents in Nandi-hills Sub-county, Nandi County, Kenya under a fairly new devolved system put in place by the constitution of Kenya in 2010. Study Design:  Descriptive cross sectional case study survey design was adopted for the study. Place and Duration of Study: The study was conducted in Nandi-hills Sub-County, Nandi County, Kenya. Data were collected between January and April, 2019. Methodology: All the Extension agents in the Sub-county were targeted. A questionnaire with closed and open ended questions was used to collect data from the 32 participants in the Sub-county and the data was analysed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 20. Descriptive statistics were utilized to document the practises based on their frequencies and associations. 7% of the respondents were certificate holders, 37% were diploma holders while a majority; 56% were degree holders. Associations between attributes was analysed by running Goodman and Kruskals’ gamma. Results: Findings indicated that lack of organized knowledge sharing fora, poor ICT infrastructure, lack of budgetary support and transport were the major challenges facing knowledge management. There was strong negative correlation between education levels with rating of knowledge storage (Gamma = - 0.647, p = 0.001) and with access to stored information (Gamma = - 0.824, p = 0.001). Conclusion: Diverse methods of knowledge capture and storage were utilized and faced varied challenges mostly attributed to inadequate facilitation to support knowledge capture and storage in modern forms such as ICT. Cooperation and collaboration with private sector players was adopted as a strategy to cope with the challenges.