COUPLES TRAINING, AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION AND INVESTMENT IN CÔTE D’IVOIRE

Last registered on April 16, 2024

Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
COUPLES TRAINING, AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION AND INVESTMENT IN CÔTE D’IVOIRE
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0013330
Initial registration date
April 09, 2024

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published
April 16, 2024, 2:45 PM EDT

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Locations

Region

Primary Investigator

Affiliation
The World Bank

Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Affiliation
World Bank
PI Affiliation
World Bank
PI Affiliation
Amazon

Additional Trial Information

Status
Completed
Start date
2016-06-01
End date
2018-12-01
Secondary IDs
Prior work
This trial does not extend or rely on any prior RCTs.
Abstract
Agriculture employs the majority of the labor force in developing countries, and plays a critical role in economic development (Gollin, Lagakos, and Waugh 2014; Herrendorf, Rogerson, and Valentinyi 2014). Most of the global poor live in Sub-Saharan Africa, where agriculture is the dominant income-generating activity, with nearly nine in ten rural households generating income from crop production (Davis, Di Giuseppe, and Zezza 2017; World Bank 2018). Agricultural productivity in the region remains low. Increasing it will be critical to making a meaningful dent in global poverty. Bolstering rates of investment and adoption of improved technology are crucial to this endeavor. Indeed, poverty-reducing agricultural growth in the region is expected to come largely from expanded use of technology, including improved seeds and agro-chemicals (Sheahan and Barrett 2017).
Yet, investment is often costly, particularly for poor households. In the face of imperfections in credit and labor markets, households can face steep trade-offs between current and future production. Low returns to saving and high costs of borrowing make smoothing from one harvest to the next more costly and raise the relative price of consumption at times of the year most distant from the previous harvest (Kaminski, Christiaensen, and Gilbert 2014). This cost is magnified for investments that take relatively longer to yield returns, such as crops with long maturation periods.
One potential way to improve household efficiency is by facilitating communication and coordination of production decisions within the family. We test this hypothesis among couples in rural Côte d’Ivoire. We randomly selected 1,491 (male) lead farmers to receive ~600 (2 ha worth) subsidized high-yield variety rubber seedlings. We randomize wives’ participation in an agricultural extension training for rubber, a slow-maturing crop that requires upfront care. In the without-wife group, households witness an 18.4 percent drop in agricultural productivity. In the group with wife participation, households increase their labor hours and input use—resulting in no drop in overall productivity—and have 20 percent higher investment levels. This impact is not due to improved skills or incentives when wives participate, but rather due to better planning and a reduction in gendered task division. The wife’s presence and participation in the creation of an action plan for rubber cultivation increases her visibility and planned responsibility in rubber production, with a more than three-fold increase in agricultural tasks assigned to her management in the action plan compared to in the individual training.
External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
Donald, Aletheia et al. 2024. "COUPLES TRAINING, AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION AND INVESTMENT IN CÔTE D’IVOIRE." AEA RCT Registry. April 16. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.13330-1.0
Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
Intervention (Hidden)
Intervention Start Date
2016-08-01
Intervention End Date
2016-11-01

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
Investment - number of trees planted
Production and yield: all and rubber

Primary Outcomes (explanation)

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
Input use: non-labor and labor inputs, all plots and rubber plots
Task allocation
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
Our sampling frame is the APROMAC database of farmers who applied to receive high-yield variety rubber seedlings from the program. While a small number of female producers also applied to receive rubber seedlings, here we focus on the male producers only. We randomly assigned these male farmers to two variants of the agricultural extension training. The randomization was done at the village-level to ease training implementation and minimize non-compliance with treatment status. Once a village had been randomly labelled as an individual training (T1) or couples’ training (T2) village, we randomly selected a fixed number of male lead farmer applicants to receive that village’s training (T1 or T2) or be in the control group.

The training curriculum consisted of three main blocks. The first (“gender reflection”), administered to both the individual and couples’ group, prompted couples to reflect on division of labor, asset ownership and sharing of decision-making and income within the household. The material for this part of the training was adapted from the Gender Balance Tree portion of Oxfam’s Gender Action Learning System (Oxfam 2014).
The second block (“knowledge”) consisted of a standard agricultural extension training related to rubber cultivation, where farmers were taught how to choose the right plot, prepare the land, space trees at planting, apply inputs, weed and intercrop.
The last block (“action plan”) consisted of the creation of an action plan, where farmers had to write down the activities to do to take care of their rubber tree in the first two years, when they would do them, who would manage the task, what resources would be necessary, and where the money would come from. Moreover, before starting to fill out the action plan, farmers had to reflect on how to split decision-making on rubber and income earned from rubber with their spouses. In the couples’ training group, attendance was mandatory for both the lead farmer and his spouse or cohabitating partner (henceforth ‘spouse’) throughout the 3-day training. In the individual training group, the farmer attended the training by himself: attendance of the spouse was only permitted for the gender reflection portion.
Experimental Design Details
Randomization Method
In office by computer
Randomization Unit
Village
Was the treatment clustered?
Yes

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
214
Sample size: planned number of observations
1500
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
112
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
IRB Approval Date
IRB Approval Number

Post-Trial

Post Trial Information

Study Withdrawal

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Intervention

Is the intervention completed?
No
Data Collection Complete
Data Publication

Data Publication

Is public data available?
No

Program Files

Program Files
Reports, Papers & Other Materials

Relevant Paper(s)

Reports & Other Materials