Year: 2013
Type: preprint
Abstract: In this paper, we estimate the impact of a farmer field school intervention among small scale farmers in Northern Tanzania. Unlike previous farmer field school evaluations, we go beyond the immediate agricultural impact and estimate the impact of farmer field school participation on the pre-specified development objectives, namely poverty alleviation and food security among participating households. We exploit the implementation design of a gradual project roll-out to establish a quasi-experimental difference-in-difference setup, which can account for potential selection into the project, both at village and household level, despite the lack of baseline data. We find strong positive effects on measures of food security, but we find no effect on the poverty indicators. We investigate possible mechanisms for this and conclude that both reallocation of labor resources and improved production smoothing among participation households may, in part, lead to this finding.
Authors: Helene Bie Lilleør, Anna Folke Larsen
Language: English
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3124025615