This study evaluated a large-scale agricultural extension program's impacts on women's technology adoption and food security in Uganda. The program led to better basic cultivation methods and improved food security. Farmers also modified how they coped with shocks.
This article attempts to fill an important knowledge gap by studying conservation agriculture (CA) adoption in southern Malawi. The results show that farmers view adoption of CA as a series of separate decisions, rather than a single decision, and that mulching residues and intercropping or rotating with legumes introduces a multiplier effect on the adoption of zero tillage.
This study used ethnographic interviews and machine learning to explore how farmers decide to adopt specific activities on CA in Malawi. The results show that adoption by neighbors (i.e., peer effects) matters most, with possible implications for the overall cost of encouraging CA (e.g., through subsidies) as it is taken up across a landscape.
This study used longitudinal household data to determine which factors affected demand for index based livestock insurance (IBLI). While both price and the non-price factors studied previously are indeed important, the findings indicate that basis risk and spatiotemporal adverse selection also play a major role in determining demand for IBLI.
The research team evaluates the impacts of forest user group participation under Malawi's Forest Co-management Program on forest clearing and household income. Using propensity score weighting and propensity score analysis with non-parametric regression, the team finds that the program lowered the rate and extent of forest clearing.
Small-scale fisheries in developing countries employ the majority of the world's fishers and are a critical source of income and nutrition for billions of people, yet they frequently suffer from overfishing. The team explores the mechanisms by which this undesirable outcome arises and argue that institutional reform should consider that resource users make jointly determined decisions about gear choice, including illegal ones, and harvest rates.
Behavioral poverty traps and shortsightedness reinforce each other. By using a model with long-term planning horizon, this tool can help improve economic decisions and prospects based on a randomized controlled trial in Mozambique providing agro-input subsidies.
This presentation was presented in Nairobi, Kenya on May 24, 2017 describing the problems Sub-Saharan Africa faces for missing the "Green Revolution" of seed-fertilizer between 1960-2000 and what can be done today.
