The Government extension services in Papua New Guinea (PNG) are weak. There is a general lack of money and staff, and the country has a poor infrastructure. Above all small-scale farmers in remote areas are left out of developments. This applies in particular to women farmers, despite their providing 85 per cent of the rural workforce.

Publicly elected women representatives in India ought to take advantage of their influence to defend women’s rights.

German Development Cooperation has developed an approach for the sustainable production of charcoal that has proved to have a considerable impact in Northern Madagascar. Since both environmental and socioeconomic aspects are addressed in a very effective way, this approach has high potential referring to global challenges such as land degradation, rural poverty and climate change.

Following the end of apartheid, South Africa’s government set itself ambitious goals with a planned land reform. However, there have since been barely any changes in the country’s agricultural structure, and the positive impacts that were hoped for on rural livelihoods have hardly materialised. A critical assessment of 22 years of land reform policies.

Snakebites are a crucial, yet underreported issue in many South Asian countries. In India, they kill some 50,000 people every year. However, the government has neglected the issue. Now, it’s time to seriously address this all but forgotten public health problem, our author maintains.

A project in Burkina Faso has given a clear demonstration of what supporting family farms can achieve in terms of poverty alleviation and rural development. One important success factor was the transfer of land to farmers, accompanied by a secure land-tenure policy adapted to their needs.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will amount to little unless backed by reliable indicators. Only with good metrics can the agenda be implemented and progress measured. Just like the SDGs themselves, the indicators are still in the discussion phase, with the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) one of the many players in this process. They outline their recommendations in the following article, using rural development as an example to describe them.

In Kenya, smallholders are improving the health of their families by growing local cereal varieties and indigenous vegetables. The use of traditional foods is even helping people with HIV/AIDS.

Fishery plays a crucial role in poverty and hunger alleviation. It is therefore all the more important to secure the long-term conservation of fish stocks as a natural resource and to ensure fair access to them.

Providing extension and advisory services is expensive. There are salaries to be paid, transporta­tion and operational funds to be provided, buildings to be rented or built, demonstration plots to maintain, and continued education to be offered to the extension staff. And then there is the need to continually invest in an overall functioning agricultural innovation system with strong research and teaching institutions, enabling policies, as well as to make capital investments in rural infrastructure that will not only benefit the farming population.

Over the last few decades, the range of agricultural extension and advisory services as well as the notions of which tools and methods are most suitable have seen fundamental changes. Our authors give an overview of old and new approaches, showing what we already know and where there is a need for more information.

Rural extension services are an extremely complex affair. This is due to the wide range of constellations in which farmers operate nowadays, and also to the large number of players who are active in advisory services, with their different tasks, values and mandates. With reference to Germany’s rural extension services, our author shows who is taking on which role and where conflicts might potentially arise.