A design approach for financial literacy curriculum targeting smallholders in Papua New Guinea

Agricultural extension plays a vital role in closing the capacity gaps of smallholder farmers throughout low- and middle-income countries, and there is an increasing interest to improve extension outcomes due to its central role in improving livelihood outcomes. Central to this interest is widening the scope of extension content to cover essential agribusiness skills, which, due to the challenges in breaking down this nuanced content into culturally appropriate content and delivery, have been largely absent from agricultural extension. This research details an approach used in Papua New Guinea to develop a series of learner- and problem-centred coursebooks to assist smallholder farmers to overcome the dominant agribusiness challenge facing smallholders throughout the world–accessing finance. The coursebooks were designed from ‘the space between’, an emerging perspective of community membership where deep content knowledge and anthropological insights of the learning culture combine to envision new ways for nuanced content to be culturally placed. The approach detailed in this research can serve as an important reference to other practitioners working to design extension curricula for agribusiness skills within agricultural extension.