Over the river and through the hills to my mentor’s site we go…

Today we went on a field trip for our tech session to my mentor’s site.  It was really refreshing to get out of our classroom and drive through the countryside to see a volunteer in his home site and meet his partners!  We had some very informative sessions on ACSA, which is an agricultural extension NGO that was started around 1998 with funding from the World Bank.  An interesting note is that unlike the university-led model in the United States for agricultural extension, it seems that in Moldova the agricultural university and other national institutions do the research and rely upon NGOs and other organizations of the like to act as extension agents of the research findings and information.  It seems to be functioning pretty well, however, there are some instances of contextual gaps.  Such as sending pamphlets to a small village with information on raising large numbers of a specific breed of horses, when in fact that breed is not in the village and the capacity to grow that number does not exist.  I think things like this happen in the United States as well.  When scientific knowledge becomes so wrapped up in benefiting science itself rather than conducting applicable and scalable research projects.  We were also able to meet with the Administrator of Economics for a Raion Council north of Chisinau.  It was interesting to understand the political infrastructure on the local level and the specific roles of mayors, elected council members and how this has little to no effect on the representation at the national level.  I am interested to learn more about the local representative dynamic and their involvement in agricultural extension.  This may be a good area to look into for my research on the use of information communication technologies (for agricultural purposes) in Moldova, specifically the use of mobile phone technology.  As I continue to learn more about agriculture in Moldova and the dissemination of information on a larger level, I continue to see avenues for further exploration in my research…