Are You Magicians? The Collaborative Work of an Agricultural Information Service

Based on fieldwork, we investigate the integration of an agricultural information service into a rural community in Bangladesh. We find that it takes work beyond the initial design and cursory introduction of the service to make the service work in a low-income rural community: it takes the strength of the farmers self-help groups to circulate the messages by word-of-mouth, it takes posters placed at key junctions according to a socio-geographic understanding of the village manifest in a map, and it (ideally) involves the support of the elite of the community via the broadcast of messages at places of high symbolic value. It takes all this in addition to a well-made information service delivering relevant and timely messages on for example agricultural matters. Hence, reducing the issue to one of technical delivery mechanism does not tell the full story.