Extension services in Ethiopia: First adoption of chemical fertilizers in rural villages

Abstract

In this paper we evaluate the efficiency of extension programmes in the adoption of chemical fertilizers in Ethiopia between 1994 and 2004 using matching techniques in a quasi-experimental setting. In addition to common factors, measures of culture, proxied by ethnicity and religion, aim to control for potential tensions between extension agents and peasants. We find considerable impact of extension services on the first fertilizer adoption. Although, there are several exercises of evaluation of extension services policies, this paper manages to disentangle the policy treatment from other confounding effects for two reasons. Firstly, we focus on the first adoption decision to isolate the effect of new information provided by the extension service. Secondly, we restrict the sample to villages characterized by late adoption, id est villages where adoption had not occurred before and its appearance can be associated with the policy action with more certitude.

Keywords:

• adoption
• extension service
• culture
• matching frontier
• Ethiopia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Namely the Peasant Associations Adado, Dinki, Doma, Geblen, Haresaw, Imdibir and Shumsheha.

2 The questionnaire of the 2009 round of the survey lacks the specific questions about extension service participation between 2004 and 2009 and the information is not identifiable in the raw data. Hence, the last survey round is excluded from the analysis.

3 Hereby, the diffusion of fertilizer presents the share of households within a society, that have applied fertilizers at least once. The author is aware that the initial adoption of fertilizer does not imply a persistent usage and that the decision to apply fertilizer occurs repeatedly over time which results in a fluctuation of fertilizer application rates between years.

4 Since values in Table 2 correspond to 1994 as reference year, all indicators, apart from distance to market, may be erroneous due to fertilizer uptake before 1994.

5 In order to avoid bias from migration, we correct for migration history and do not consider fertilizer adoption prior to land ownership.

6 Droughts and other weather shocks were severe in any of the 15 PA’s of the ERHS and all suffered to various degrees from the Derg regime. However, fertilizer application took place in most locations and only Doma, Geblen and Haresaw seem to be thwarted by the political situation in this particular context.

7 King, Lucas, and Nielsen (2016) prove the optimality of their algorithm as pruning does not affect the nearest matched unit(s). See King, Lucas, and Nielsen (2016) for the full proof.

8 The proportions refer to the frequency of treated (control) units per stratum in relation to the entire frequency of treated (control) units in the strata (King, Lucas, and Nielsen 2016).

9 Fertilizer adopters do not appear in the sample after the adoption took place as the concern of the work is to evaluate determinants of the very first adoption and not to address the repeated confirmation of the adoption decision.

10 Farm size, literacy and sex are relatively time consistent but we account for potential changes. If it was impossible to determine the status of a variable with certainty for the point in time, the observation was excluded from the sample.

11 The L₁ suffers from keeping all treated households and is not able to completely remove the significant differences in farm size.

12 Equb or iqub, are local types of rotating savings and credit associations.

13 Minimum distance achievable is zero for the AMI but requires pruning down to two observations and a L₁ distance of 0.428 for a sub-sample with more treated than control units.

14 In order to inspect the robustness of the estimated ATT, the matching procedure has been iterated for each year of the time period across all villages to analyze annual variations and to observe local differences relating to each village. Robustness checks are available upon request and present on a previous working paper version of this work (Jordan and Guerzoni 2020).