Icts Usage Among Rural Communities in the Information Age: A Case Study of Small Scale Farmers in Eastern Cape Province South Africa

Abstract

There is a mismatch between research output and farmers' ICT practices. In this case study in the former Transkei and Ciskei Homelands, 48 small-scale farmers were approached to understand the factors that impede ICTs use to access agricultural information. The farmers were found to use and see the usefulness of ICTs basically in terms of social interactions and the most frequent used ICTs by respondents are mobile phone (100%) followed by radio (58.3%), Television (18.8%), Internet (10.4%) and news paper (6.3%). There is a need to do an in-depth research about e-skills of the farmers and other factors that may be causing hindrance to the usage of other recent advances of Internet and ICTs for seeking information.