Calendrier du 03 novembre 2020
Applied Economics Lunch Seminar
Du 03/11/2020 de 12:30 à 13:30
via ZOOM
BEHAGHEL Luc (PSE)
Social learning in agriculture: does smallholder heterogeneity impede technology diffusion in Sub-Saharan Africa?
écrit avec Karen Macours & Jérémie Gignoux (INRAE/PSE)
Evaluating a large-scale program for dairy farmers in Uganda, we show that a simple version of the “contact farmer” extension model can meaningfully increase smallholder farmers’ revenues. While the program provides no monetary incentives, we find evidence that two other ingredients – backstopping by professional extension agent and advertising pro-social motivation – reinforce its impacts.
Though it has been hypothesized to be a major impediment to social learning in Sub-Saharan African agriculture, we do not find smallholder heterogeneity to condition the effectiveness of the approach: farmer trainers trained to take this heterogeneity into consideration do not perform better; moreover, we find no statistical evidence that program effects vary by farmers’ characteristics.