The welfare enhancing effects of agricultural innovation platforms and soil monitoring tools on farming household outcomes in southeastern Africa

ABSTRACT

Utilizing survey information obtained from five irrigation schemes in southeastern Africa, we investigated the influence of agricultural innovation platforms (AIPs) and monitoring tools on a range of farm and household outcome indicators. Doubly robust estimation was used to measure the effects of these interventions, with a variety of other methods used for robustness checks. Involvement in AIP activities and using monitoring tools was found to be statistically associated with increased on-farm income together with an increased capacity to fund child education. Participation in AIPs also had a significant positive influence on off-farm income and reduced food shortages. Moreover, spillover effects were accounted for in the estimations and statistically significant positive effects were found regarding on-farm income for non-participants. These findings suggest that interventions with strong agricultural innovation system approaches in irrigation schemes in Africa could provide significant societal benefits.

KEYWORDS:

• Agricultural innovation platforms
• irrigation
• monitoring tools
• spillovers
• doubly robust estimation

Acknowledgements

The Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research financed this research through the Transforming Irrigation in Southern Africa (TISA) projects FSC/2013/006 and LWR/2016/137. We also thank all TISA project team members for collecting the survey data and other contributions, Adam Wheeler for editing assistance and small-scale farmers who participated in the survey.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author.

Notes

1 Despite the fact that numerous other terminologies are present in the literature to denote innovation platforms, we use the term agricultural innovation platforms throughout this study in order to be consistent with our project design.

2 It is relevant to note that not all entities may have all the resources and expertise but in the AIP process they are able to identify other actors along the product value chain whom they are able to connect and bring into the AIP to support or implement identified solutions to the barriers.

3 In addition to this study, another project named ‘Virtual Irrigation Academy’, was also carried out in the Kiwere site of Tanzania from 2016. Therefore, the number of surveyed irrigators with monitoring tools in Kiwere within this study was 39, rather than the intended 20. We included these observations in the analysis on the basis that some of the project team members were involved in the two projects and that both of these projects were sponsored by the same institution (ACIAR).

4 It is essential to note that due to insufficient observations, it was difficult to examine the joint influences of AIPs coupled with monitoring tools on farm household outcomes. Hence, our analysis was restricted to examine the impacts of each interventions separately, whilst incorporating the other intervention in the analysis as an independent variable.

5 Cerulli (2017) advised that variables utilised to quantify the similarity of irrigation intervention participants and non-participants needs to be numeric. Given that granting monitoring tools to a group of farmers in each study schemes may lead to self as well as inter-farmer learnings, we incorporated tools location and other variables that were expected to trigger learning to produce the correlation matrix. As such, we considered semi-continuous variables along with numeric variables to calculate the matrix, and conducted extensive sensitivity testing.

6 Although these estimates offer an indication of the spillover effects of AIP events or monitoring tools, caution is advised, as our matrix may not properly reflect the extents of the similarity of intervention participant and non-participant irrigators. Our results could be under or over-estimated.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research [FSC/2013/006], the University of Adelaide and partly supported by the Australian Research Council [FT140100773].