Anne G. Timu

Impacts of gender-inclusive extension approaches on farmer understanding and willingness to pay for bundled financial services

Building the resilience of smallholder farmers, and their ability to cope with the negative impacts of climate shocks can significantly improve the sustainability of agriculture as a reliable source of livelihood. While innovations such as index insurance and bundled financial instruments could enhance smallholder farmers’ climate resilience, their uptake, and use remain low, especially among women farmers. Based on experimental data from a risk contingent credit (RCC—an insurance bundled credit product) project in Kenya, we argue that employing inclusive extension approaches that address social inequities in information access and use could enhance gender equality in product understanding, a key determinant of uptake. We evaluate the gender differences of the impacts of conventional face-to-face, animated brochures, and video-based extension approaches on product understanding and willingness to pay (WTP) for RCC. We find that; (i) providing animated brochures to a random subset of farmers significantly improved their understanding and WTP for the product, (ii) the use of animated videos significantly increased product understanding, but it had weaker impacts on the farmers’ WTP, and (iii) the impact of animated brochures on product understanding was significantly larger among women farmers. This study underscores the importance of addressing social and cultural barriers to agricultural information access and use, and designing tailored extension approaches to support men and women in making informed decisions about climate risk management. From a policy perspective, we conclude that addressing these barriers could foster a socially fair, and a more sustainable and resilient agricultural sector for both men and women smallholder farmers.

An approach for assessing whether agricultural projects help smallholders transition to better livelihood strategies: A Malawian case study

Agricultural projects typically aim to promote the uptake of project components amongst targeted small farm populations to improve their farm productivity and welfare. While this approach can be an important first step towards improving smallholder livelihoods, it ignores alternative and often superior livelihood options that might arise within the rural transformation process, particularly in commercial agriculture and the rural nonfarm economy. We argue that the design of smallholder projects implemented within regions already undergoing a dynamic transformation and/or projects which have significant value chain components, should be broadened to assist smallholders in making successful transitions to their best livelihood options. For such projects, monitoring and evaluation activities should track livelihood transitions as well as the usual assessments of productivity and welfare outcomes. To help operationalize such an approach, we propose a typology of smallholder livelihood strategies that can track transitions over time and illustrate its use with data from the Sustainable Agricultural Production Program (SAPP), an agricultural value chain project in Malawi. Using available household panel data and quasi-experimental econometric approaches, we find that the project helped smallholders transition out of subsistence farming to market-oriented farming and helped already existing market-oriented farmers remain as such. Even though the project did not have any specific components designed to promote off-farm incomes, nevertheless, it facilitated many farm household transitions to off-farm diversified livelihoods, possibly due to spillover benefits generated within the local nonfarm economy. All SAPP facilitated transitions led to increases in household incomes. We conclude with some lessons for designing, monitoring, and the evaluation of future agricultural projects.

Evaluating the gendered credit constraints and uptake of an insurance-linked credit product among smallholder farmers in Kenya