Seeing is believing ? evidence from an extension network experiment

Florence Kondylis, Valerie Mueller and Siyao Jessica Zhu

No 7000, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: Extension is designed to enable lab-to-farm technology diffusion. Decentralized models assume that information flows from researchers to extension workers, and from extension agents to contact farmers (CFs). CFs should then train other farmers in their communities. Such a modality may fail to address informational inefficiencies and accountability issues. The authors run a field experiment to measure the impact of augmenting the CF model with a direct CF training on the diffusion of a new technology. All villages have CFs and access the same extension network. In treatment villages, CFs additionally receive a three-day, central training on the new technology. They track information transmission through two nodes of the extension network: from extension agents to CFs, and from CFs to other farmers. Directly training CFs leads to a large, statistically significant increase in adoption among CFs. However, higher levels of CF adoption have limited impact on the behavior of other farmers.

Keywords: Adaptation to Climate Change; Climate Change and Agriculture (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-08-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-dev and nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Seeing is believing? Evidence from an extension network experiment (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:7000

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