The Impact of Beekeeping on Livelihood and Yield of Coffee and Other Pollinator Dependent Crops: A Group-based Experimental Evidence from Ethiopia

The International Centre for Insect Physiology and Ecology (icipe) has been implementing a youth livelihood program called More Young Entrepreneurs in Silk and Honey (MOYESH) since October 2019. The Programme aims to create decent jobs for more than 100,000 unemployed young men and women in rural areas by building their technical and entrepreneurship skills, providing starter kits such as beehives and protective clothes, and linking with financial and market services. The Programme delivers these services to youth groups and individuals to establish beekeeping and sericulture framing businesses working in communal lands and community watersheds to produce honey and engage in related businesses such as crop and seedling production and animal fattening. The youth enterprises are expected to produce more than 30,000 tons of honey and generate more than US$120 million income from honey, silk, and complementary by 2024. In addition to income and honey production, the beekeeping activity promotes ecosystem services through increasing cross-pollination of crops such as coffee farms.
To evaluate the incremental effect of managed bees on the productivity of pollinator-dependent crops, we will provide two beehives for the youths, and they will produce honey and related products following conventional program activities. The apiary sites (beehives) will be put inside/near pollinator-dependent crops such as coffee. The control groups will not receive any of the interventions. This design will enable us not only to estimate the pollination benefits of supplying beehives but also the MOYESH’s impact on youth livelihood.

2023-07-24

2024-08-31

1. Income of the youth groups
2. Yield of coffee plots (ton per hectare)

The first primary outcome variable will be computed by aggregating the income of the youth enterprises from their all income-generating activities (both honey production and side businesses). The second primary outcome variable, the yield of coffee, is computed by dividing total annual coffee harvest by the area of the plot from which the coffee is harvested.

Yield of other pollination-dependent crops around the apiary site and total honey production by the youth enterprises.

The International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (icipe) has been implementing a youth livelihood program called More Young Entrepreneurs in Silk and Honey (MOYESH) since October 2019. The Programme aims to create decent jobs for more than 100,000 unemployed young men and women in rural areas by building their technical and entrepreneurship skills, providing starter kits such as beehives and protective clothes, and linking with financial and market services. The Programme delivers these services to youth groups and individuals to establish beekeeping and sericulture framing businesses working in communal lands and community watersheds to produce honey and engage in related businesses such as crop and seedling production and animal fattening. The youth enterprises are expected to produce more than 30,000 tons of honey and generate more than US$120 million income from honey, silk, and complementary by 2024. In addition to income and honey production, the beekeeping activity promotes ecosystem services through increasing cross-pollination of crops such as coffee farms.
To evaluate the incremental effect of managed bees on the productivity of pollinator-dependent crops, we will provide two beehives for the youths, and they will produce honey and related products following conventional program activities. The apiary sites (beehives) will be put inside/near pollinator-dependent crops such as coffee. The control groups will not receive any of the interventions. This design will enable us not only to estimate the pollination benefits of supplying beehives but also the MOYESH’s impact on youth livelihood.

The village-level randomized assignment procedure has a treatment arm and a control group.
1. Control group: This refers to youth who will not receive any intervention by the program.
2. Treatment group This is the youths who are organized in groups and receive the regular MOYESH package (technical and business skills training, beehives with bee colonies, and other hive tools).

Not available

Randomization will be done using a computer by the Stata program.

The village is the randomization unit. Each village is randomly assigned to a treatment and control group.

Yes

80 Villages (40 treatment and 40 control).

800 observations (enterprises).

400 control and 400 treatment enterprises. Each village will have 10 enterprises which means 800 enterprises (400 control and 400 treatment).

The minimum detectable effect is 20%. The desired power (β=0.80), alpha adjusted for multiple hypothesis testing (α=0.03561997), intra-cluster correlation (rho=0.99611), number of individuals per cluster (n=10), mean of coffee yield (ton/ha) (µ= 6.101442) and standard deviation (δ= 1.831227).