Factors affecting ICT use by fruit producers in Nangarhar province of Afghanistan

ICT helps farmers to find access to Agriculture related information like Agro-techniques, pre and post -harvesting technologies and Agricultural marketing. Horticulture sector, especially fruit production has an important impact on economic growth and export of Afghanistan. Nangarhar province has very suitable climate for different types of fruit production. The objective of this study is to analyze the factors affecting ICT usages, the problems faced by fruit producers and availability of ICT to farmers in Nangarhar province of Afghanistan. There are 13 main constraints/challenges that the fruit growers are faced. The Wilcoxton Signed-Rank test is used to compare these challenges faces by farmers. For this purpose, the data from a survey of 150 fruit producers’ farmers in Behsood district of Nangarhar province in Afghanistan was used. Four of these challenges such as lack of training institutes, basic ICT usage, interpersonal problem and high cost of ICT devices have high ranking and are the most important challenges for fruit producers and the remaining nine challenges are ranked very low for fruit producers in Nangarhar province. In this study the probit model test is used to assess the ICT usage by fruit growers, the dependent variables are presenting individual farmer’s ICT usage. The average of all 13 tasks is more than 2.5, implying that each of the problems listed above has an average basis. However, the most serious issue is a lack of training institutes, which accounts for 4.3 percent of the total. The study finds that the less than 60 percent of farmers are using the PC and 66.23 percent are using the internet on their own. The government of Afghanistan should establish training institutes, provide of ICT usages extension, solve interpersonal problem and provide low-cost ICT for fruit growers in Nangarhar province of Afghanistan.