Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: Byrnes2 Document Number: C12348
Notes:
Francis C. Byrnes Collection, Pages 581-593 in Borton, Raymond E. (ed.), Selected readings to accompany getting agriculture moving. Volume 2. Agricultural Development Council, New York, NY. 526 p.
35 pages, We use data from a randomised experiment in Uganda to examine effects of incentives
on the decision to adopt drought-tolerant maize varieties (DTMVs) and mechanisms
through which effects occur. We find that social recognition (SR) incentives to a
random subset of trained farmers – disseminating farmers (DFs) – increase knowledge
transmission from DFs to their co-villagers and change information networks of both
DFs and their neighbours. SR also increases DFs’ likelihood of adopting DTMVs.
However, the corresponding results for private material rewards are not conclusively
strong. We find no evidence that incentives for knowledge diffusion increase the
likelihood of co-villagers adopting DTMVs
Ngoma, Hambulo (author), Mason-Wardell, Nichole M. (author), Samboko, Paul C. (author), and Hangoma, Peter (author)
Format:
Research summary
Publication Date:
2019
Published:
Zambia: Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics, Michigan State University, East Lansing.
Location:
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 166 Document Number: D11674
Notes:
4 pages., Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Security Policy, Research Paper 164., Using games, researchers tested the hypothesis that innate behavioral traits such as risk and time preferences play a role in Zambia farmers' decisions about adoption of Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) practices. "Given our findings that more risk-averse individuals are less likely to adopt CSA, a practice that is intended to be risk-reducing, a key policy implication is the need for a retooling of both public and private extension services to better demonstrate and educate farmers on the risk-reducing effect of CSA practices such as conservation agriculture. Moreover, if insurance and subsidies are to be used successfully to nudge adoption, extension will need to educate farmers on the structure of and mechanisms of payouts. This is important to build trust in the incentive systems.
