SOME DOWNWARD ACCOUNTABILITY REQUIREMENTS IN AGRICULTURAL EXTENSION (REVIEW)

Downward accountability is crucial in agricultural extension to ensure services respond to farmers' needs and priorities and improve the quality of extension services to smallholder farmers. It enhances decision-making, increases transparency, improves agricultural productivity, increases farmer participation in program development, implementation, and evaluation, and addresses problems at lower levels. Achieving bottom-up accountability can be difficult and requires empowering the rural poor and marginalized groups to participate effectively. Extension services must be responsive and directly address farmers' needs. downward accountability is an ongoing process and requires sustained effort and commitment. Extension workers keep farmers accountable for ensuring their services meet their needs, which was first implemented in the early 2000s. It has been used by agricultural extension programs, especially in developing countries. This is what was previously known as bottom-up evaluation, and it is almost absent in many extension systems and there is no clear picture of it. Studies indicate that downward accountability is still limited and needs to be operationalized to enable farmers to participate in service operations and evaluations. Therefore, the article aims to identify the concept, types, importance, principles, challenges, mechanisms for holding farmers accountable, and the basic requirements for achieving accountability in agricultural extension. Some of the key requirements for downward accountability include governance structure, transparency, monitoring and evaluation, capacity development, sustained commitment, feedback mechanisms, demand-side financing, use of ICT, participatory approaches, and changes in extension systems. These requirements are necessary to activate bottom-up accountability in agricultural extension and enable farmers to request their needs from the services provided by the public sector so that they can meet their challenges and achieve agricultural sustainability.