Kristjanson, P (author), Place, F (author), Franzel, F (author), Thornton, P.K. (author), and International Livestock Research Institute, Nairobi, Kenya
International Centre for Research on Agroforestry, Nairobi, Kenya
Format:
Online journal article
Publication Date:
2002-02-23
Published:
Kenya: Science Direct
Location:
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 109 Document Number: D10958
20 pages, via online journal, In this paper we provide evidence to show that farmers' perspectives on poverty processes and outcomes are critical in the early stages of evaluating impact of agricultural research on poverty. We summarize lessons learned from farmer impact assessment workshops held in five African locations, covering three agro-ecological zones and five different agroforestry and livestock technologies arising from collaborative national–international agricultural research. Poverty alleviation is a process that needs to be understood before impact can be measured. Workshops such as those we describe can help researchers to identify farmers' different ways of managing and using a technology and likely effects, unanticipated impacts, major impacts to pursue in more quantitative studies, the primary links between agricultural technology and poverty, and key conditioning factors affecting adoption and impact that can be used to stratify samples in more formal analyses. Farmer workshops inform other qualitative and quantitative impact assessment methods. We discuss the linkage of farmer-derived information with GIS-based approaches that allow more complete specification of recommendation domains and broader-scale measurement of impact.
31pgs, This article aims at investigating the impact of financial supports from agricultural policy on farm-size dynamics. Since not all farms may behave alike, a non-stationary mixed-Markov chain modelling (M-MCM) approach is applied to capture unobserved heterogeneity in the movements of farms across economic size (ES) classes. A multinomial logit specification is used for transition probabilities and the parameters are estimated by the maximum likelihood method and the Expectation-Maximisation (EM) algorithm. An empirical application to an unbalanced panel from 2000 to 2018 shows that French farming consists of ‘almost stayers’, with a high probability of remaining in the same ES class over time, and ‘likely movers’, which present a higher probability of a change in size. The results also show that the impact of subsidies and other economic factors depends greatly on the type that a farm belongs to. These findings confirm that individual characteristics of farmers may be relevant for policy efficiency and more attention should thus be paid to unobserved farm heterogeneity in both policy design and the assessment of their impacts on farm-size dynamics.
12 pages, Extension program participants tell story after story of the impact of Cooperative Extension on their lives, their families, and their businesses. Despite huge amounts of qualitative data, very little quantitative data exist showing the aggregated public value of Extension programs—especially across program areas. The lack of data leaves Extension administrators high and dry when they are asked to show public value, a circumstance sometimes resulting in reductions in human and financial resources. A simple, yet powerful Extension public value instrument was developed and used in Georgia along with analysis methods designed to showcase the short-, medium-, and long-term impacts of Extension programs.
