Gender and Agricultural Extension Access: A Review of Impacts on Productivity, Income, and Empowerment

Abstract

Gender-differentiated access to agricultural extension remains a persistent institutional constraint in smallholder agriculture. Although extension is often presented as a neutral mechanism for transferring agronomic knowledge, technologies, climate information and market advice, access to extension is shaped by land rights, labour responsibilities, mobility norms, literacy, digital access, group membership and intrahousehold decision-making. This narrative review examines how gendered access to agricultural extension affects productivity, income and empowerment. The article synthesises peer-reviewed literature published mainly between 2000 and 2026, with selective use of an authoritative international report for policy context. The literature search covered from January 2000 to present, while allowing selective inclusion of older classic studies where they remained analytically important. The main academic databases consulted were Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar, PubMed, CAB Abstracts, AGRICOLA, AGRIS and EconLit. The review shows that extension can improve productivity and income when advice is timely, locally credible, technically sound and linked to complementary resources such as inputs, credit, labour-saving technologies, markets and farmer organisations. However, the benefits are often weaker for women when extension systems rely on male household heads, male-dominated farmer groups, digital channels controlled by men, or training formats that ignore women’s unpaid care and farm labour responsibilities. Extension contributes to empowerment when it enhances women’s knowledge, confidence, leadership, bargaining position, social networks and control over agricultural benefits. These gains are not automatic. They depend on whether women are recognised as farmers in their own right and whether extension systems address the institutional and social conditions that determine whether advice can be used. The review argues that gender-responsive extension must move beyond counting women participants and instead evaluate effective access, agency, resource control and distribution of benefits. It concludes that agricultural extension can support inclusive agricultural transformation only when technical quality and gender justice are treated as mutually reinforcing priorities.