Topic: Using Farmer Groups to Share Information

Presenter: Lauren Meinzen-Dick

Session Details: Increasing agricultural productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa is challenging, as productivity-increasing technologies are costly and most agricultural households in the region operate at small scales with low asset wealth. This motivates governments to decrease costs for households, in particular through input subsidy programs. A common approach to reduce implementation costs of these and other development programs is to administer programs through delivery agents. In the agricultural sector, these agents are often the leaders of (existing, self-selected) farmer organizations. Despite the informational advantages and potential for social learning presented by these leaders, social incentives may distort program implementation. We study the relationship between farmer organizations and their members’ adoption of an electronic voucher for agricultural inputs in Uganda. Our study leverages experimental variation in access to the e-voucher from a randomized controlled trial we conducted as well as natural variation in characteristics within and across farmer organizations to study the relationship between farmer organizations and their members’ adoption of the e-voucher, which differed substantially between groups. We find that within an organization, being a leader leads to 10-15 percentage points greater e-voucher adoption, which we hypothesize is due to an informational advantage due to their status as a leader. Secondly, we explore across organizations what enabled some organizations to encourage members to adopt while others did not. The literature has suggested a trade-off in leader sophistication vs. similarity to the members in their ability to disseminate information and foster social learning, which is consistent with the characteristics of leaders in our data. We find that leader sophistication is strongly predictive of member enrollment in the e-voucher program, while similarity is less so.

This session will be a seminar and participants are not required to read a paper beforehand.

For more information, reach out to pdri-devlab@sas.upenn.edu