Beyond the field: Impact of Farmer Field Schools on food security and poverty alleviation

Helene Bie Lilleør, Anna Folke Larsen

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Abstract

In this paper, we estimate the impact of a farmer field school intervention among small scale farmers in Northers Tanzania. Unlike previous farmer field school evaluations, we go beyond the immediate agricultural impact and estimate the impact of farmer field school participation in the pre-specified development objects, namely poverty alleviation and food security among participating households. We wxploit the implementation design of a gradual project roll-out to establish a quasi-experimental difference-in-difference setup, which can account for potential selection info the project, both at village and household level, despite the lack of baseline data. we find strong positive effects on measures of food security, but we find no effect on the poverty indicators. We investigate possible mechanisms for this and conclude that both reallocation of labor ressources and improved production smoothing among participation households may, in part, lead to this finding.
Original languageEnglish
Place of PublicationCopenhagen
PublisherRockwool Foundation
Number of pages32
Publication statusPublished - 2013
SeriesRockwool Working Paper
Number52

Keywords

  • Faculty of Social Sciences
  • impact accessment
  • farmer field schools
  • quasi difference-in-difference
  • food security
  • poverty
  • gradual roll-out
  • Tanzania
  • Africa

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