Congratulations to Professor Vivian Hoffmann on the publication of one of her papers.
Professor Hoffmann has had her paper “Self-selection versus population-based sampling for evaluation of an agronomy training program in Uganda” (joint with Miki Khanh Doan and Tomoko Harigaya) published in the Journal of Development Effectiveness. The article is a methodological piece that describes a mechanism that allowed farmers to self-select into the study sample for a randomized controlled trial of agronomic training based on their attendance in a similar training offered to both treatment and control groups. Professor Hoffmann and her co-investigators find that farmers identified in this way were much more likely to take up the randomized intervention – a finding that is important for program evaluation, as low take-up can make it difficult to assess downstream impacts.
The Journal of Development Effectiveness is a leading journal that aims to support evidence-based policy making to enhance development effectiveness by publishing high quality research that examines evidence of the impact of projects, programs and policies in or relevant to low and middle income countries, and discussions of experience in conducting impact evaluations and using their findings to inform policy and program design.
Abstract:
One of the challenges in evaluating the impact of agronomy training programs, particularly on downstream impacts such as yield, is identifying a sample of farmers who are likely to participate in the training. We assess farmers’ participation in a farm business training activity before the agronomy training intervention as a sample identification mechanism. The screening activity was designed to appeal to the same group of farmers targeted by a coffee agronomy training program, while having minimal impact on the program’s goal of increasing coffee yields. A three-session training on farm business management was conducted in 22 study villages in central Uganda. Coffee agronomy training was then offered in half of these villages, based on random assignment. The results show that 52% of coffee farmers who attended the first business training session subsequently attended agronomy training, compared to 22% of those identified through a census. Applying these results to the design of a large ongoing randomised controlled trial, we find that using a self-selected sample reduces the minimum detectable effect of agronomy training on coffee yield to 15.83%, compared to 38% if population-based sampling were used.