Knowledge and capacity development on improved farm technologies and techniques are essential for agricultural growth. Despite the extension effort to facilitate adoption and diffusion of innovation through farmers visit and training expected transformation in food production process is yet to be achieved hence, there is the need to evaluate the effectiveness of farmers’ engagement in technologies development. This study was carried out to ascertain the effectiveness of agricultural technologies training among smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan African communities. Multistage sampling techniques were used to select 200 smallholder farmers. The respondents consist of the lead and trainee farmers in the spread of knowledge and support the technology adoption which is the distinctive aspect of the study. Data were collected using focus group discussions, in-depth interviews and structured questionnaires. The collected data were analysed using deceptive statistics, likert type scales and spearman correlation. The results of the study revealed that agricultural technologies training were very effective among the smallholder farmers. A great proportion (70.5%) of the farmers indicated that the training was very effective. There was a rapid increase (85%) in the level of adoption of agricultural technologies after the participatory training among the respondents compared to pre-training (49.5%). The findings also revealed that 13 Good Agricultural Practices (GAPs) technologies were fully adopted by the majority of the smallholder farmers. In addition, our results also showed that there was a strong positive correlation (r = 0.001**, p<0.05) between agricultural technologies training sessions and adoption of Good Agricultural Practices (GAPs). The results reported that the use of participatory agricultural technologies training and trust in the lead farmers influenced farmers’ decisions to adopt and implement the recommended good agricultural practices technologies. The study recommends a policy agenda of Government that will favor improvement of agricultural extension and training for rural development to promote agricultural productivity, improving standard of living of smallholder farmers and national food security
Keywords: Adoption, Good agricultural practices, Technologies, lead farmers, smallholders
