Timely and relevant information to farmers at right time improve agricultural productivity. The importance of ICT to connect farmers with the information they need has received much attention.Rapid, efficient, and costeffective knowledge management can be achieved by ICT. However, application of ICT in knowledge management in Ethiopia is low when compared with several African countries. Various factors are determining ICT usage in agriculture by smallholder farmers.Hence, the study was carried out to identify the factors determining ICT usage in agriculture by smallholder farmers in the Tiyo District, ArsiZone.Samplemagnitude was resolute using the formula provided by Yamane.From the selected three kebeles, 146 smallholder farmers were selected using stratified random sampling technique. Quantitative data was collected through survey using semi-structured interview schedule. Qualitative data was collected through focus group discussion, key informant interview and observation. It was found through inferential statistic tests that the factors namely, family size, distance to mobile service centre, land size, economic motivation, cosmopoliteness were having non-significant relationship with ICT usage. Access to personal credit and ICT facility in FTC were constant. There was no access to personal credit for all respondents and absence of ICT facility in FTC for respondents in general.Therefore, these above-mentioned factors were not included in the model.Binary logistic regression analysis indicates that total annual income, possession of radio and television shows positive significant relationship whereas age shows negative relationship with ICT usage. Hence, the Ethiopian public extension system should concentrate more on designing radio and television programs for the transfer of technology. The government owned television channels also allocate more time for agricultural programs on fixed timings convenient to the farmers.
Volume 11 | 06-Special Issue
Pages: 1738-1748