Stimulating Innovations for Sustainable Agricultural Practices among Smallholder Farmers: Persistence of Intervention Matters

Abstract

As part of the dissemination of sustainable intensification (SI) of agricultural practices in northern Ghana, farmers were conditionally induced with inputs to adopt the SI practices. We study the effects of the conditional inducement on maize yield and net income of farmers under a quasi-randomised phase-out design. We examine the effects of the inducement by comparing continuous induced farmers with past induced and non-induced farmers. Our results indicate that the conditional inducement led to an increase in the maize yield and the net income of continuously induced farmers, on average. Estimates also suggest that the continuously induced farmers would have had their maize yields and net incomes decreased by about 64 per cent and 54 per cent, respectively if the inducement had been discontinued. Distributional analysis reveals that the inducement effects are heterogeneous and that past inducement impacted more on the maize yield and the net income of farmers at the lower quantiles. We conclude that appropriate conditional inducement can stimulate farmers’ adoption. Besides, the duration of intervention matters and must not be overlooked in interventions that necessitate gaining experience and learning.

Keywords:

• adoption
• inducement
• sustainable intensification practices
• northern Ghana
• quasi-randomised phase-out design

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to all the field assistants and farmers who provided invaluable support during the data collection. We also thank the journal editor and the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data, stata and R codes are available upon request. Data can also be accessed in the future at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/IFPRI.

Notes

1 These are events organised at the end of each cropping season with the aim of demonstrating new agricultural technologies to farmers. Farmers are brought together around field experiments guided by an extension agent or a researcher.

2 It relates to the combination of multiple inputs in an integrated way with the aim of increasing crop productivity, while at the same time lowering the environmental impacts.

3 Quasi randomised-phaseout designs are really scarce, especially in agriculture. The only exception include Fishman, Smith, Bobić, and Sulaiman (2017) and Carter, Laajaj, and Yang (2016).

4 See https://africa-rising.net

5 We used G*Power 3.1.9. version for the statistical power analysis. Our sample size corresponds to the power of 0.80, at alpha level 0.05, and with an effect size of 0.20.

Additional information

Funding

We acknowledge the support from the Germany Academic Exchange (DAAD), German Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (Grant/Award Number: 2014-0689.1), under the Center for Development Research for funding this work as part of Shaibu Mellon’s PhD thesis. The Africa Research in Sustainable Intensification for the Next Generation (Africa-RISING) programme also provided support during the field work.