Does Farmer Field School Training Improve Technical Efficiency? Evidence from Smallholder Maize Farmers in Oromia, Ethiopia

Abstract

This study examines the impact of Farmer Field School (FFS) training program on technical efficiency of smallholder farmers. The FFS program was sponsored by the Ethiopian government and launched in 2010 to scale-up best agricultural practices in the country. The study aims to compare changes in the technical efficiency of those FFS graduate and non-FFS graduate maize farmers in Ethiopia. For this, panel data were collected in two rounds from 446 randomly selected households from three districts consisting of 218 FFS graduate farmers and 228 non-FFS graduate farmers. The analytical procedure has involved three stages: in the first stage, descriptive analyses were used to detect existence of difference in the outcome indicators between the two farmer groups. In the second stage, we applied a semi-parametric impact evaluation method of propensity score matching with several matching algorithms to estimate the program impact. In the third stage, we used Difference-in-Difference as robustness check in detecting causality between program intervention and the technical efficiency changes. Our result shows that although FFS graduate farmers were identified with statistically significant positive technical efficiency difference from non-FFS graduate farmers before the FFS training, this result was reversed two years after the training. This decreasing trend in the technical efficiency of the FFS graduate farmers is explained by their reduced family labour allocation per hectare of their farmland.  As the FFS graduate farmers allocate most of their time for numerous mandatory meetings, trainings, community mobilization, they tend to use more of hired labour than maximizing their own labour for the routine agricultural practices. In the contrary, the non-FFS graduate farmers have been increasing their labour allocation per hectare and use more of non-cash involving inputs since the time of the training. It seems that the FFS training program has put disproportionately higher burden on the FFS graduates in terms giving them additional assignments that compete with the time they need for agricultural activities as compared to non-FFS graduates. Thus, it is really important for the government to consider the timing of trainings, meetings and community works so that such activities should not coincide with the peak time of agricultural land preparation and harvesting times of the farmers.

Keywords: Impact Evaluation, technical efficiency, propensity score matching, difference in difference