IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fpr/resrep/148699.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Impacts of Africa RISING in Malawi

Author

Listed:
  • Haile, Beliyou
  • Azzarri, Carlo
  • Boukaka, Sedi-Anne
  • Chikowo, Regis
  • Vitellozzi, Sveva

Abstract

This study evaluates the impact of Africa RISING, a large-scale sustainable intensification (SI) program that has been implemented in Central Malawi’s Dedza and Ntcheu districts beginning in 2012. Using a participatory action research framework, the program validated and promoted alternative SI options including fertilized maize, maize-legume intercropping, intercropping of two compatible legumes, cereal-legume rotation, and double-row planting of legumes. Impact is estimated on several SI indicators and domains using two rounds of panel data and difference-in-differences techniques. The unique study design allowed us to estimate impact by comparing outcomes among program beneficiaries with two different counterfactual groups—one located inside program villages (within village comparison) and another in non-program (control) villages (out-of-village comparison). We also conduct a placebo test comparing non-beneficiaries in the two counterfactual groups. The within-village comparison shows positive impact on several agricultural and economic indicators including access to agricultural information, value of harvest, on-farm diversity, labor profitability, annual net household income, per capita household consumption expenditure, household wealth, and household dietary diversity score. We do not find a statistically significant impact on human indicators such as child and maternal nutrition. Estimates based on within-village, out-of-village, and placebo comparisons suggest important insights about the challenges in assessing the impact of agricultural programs in general and, specifically, participatory multi-intervention programs in the presence of sample (self-)selection and spillovers. Our study highlights important lessons learned to inform future program design and impact assessments.

Suggested Citation

  • Haile, Beliyou & Azzarri, Carlo & Boukaka, Sedi-Anne & Chikowo, Regis & Vitellozzi, Sveva, 2024. "Impacts of Africa RISING in Malawi," Research reports 148699, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).
  • Handle: RePEc:fpr:resrep:148699
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cgspace.cgiar.org/bitstreams/12427fd1-c747-461e-aa60-7e47742baedf/download
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    sustainability; intensification; agriculture; maize; legumes; indicators; income; nutrition; Africa; Eastern Africa; Malawi;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fpr:resrep:148699. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ifprius.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.