Aspirational Hope and Productivity: A Randomized Control Trial Among Dairy Farmers in Bolivia

Internal constrains are gaining attention in development economics since they can help understand poverty dynamics. Focusing on aspirational hope, our study aims to relax these constraints among farmers in Bolivia. We intend to improve their aspirations, perceived agency and visualization of pathways.

We visit farmers three times with intervals of two weeks. During each visit, we show them a 15-minute video and give them a 30-minute coaching session. The video presents two role models that have successfully grown their milk producing business over the last years. The coaching sessions deepen the three aspects of aspirational hope. The first session focuses only on aspirations, the second session comprises pathways and perceived agency, and the last session summarizes the three aspects.

To evaluate our intervention, we measure the impact on three families of outcomes: aspirational hope, agricultural practices, and production and productivity. For aspirational hope, we will use indexes of aspirations, pathways and agency. For agricultural practices, we will create indexes of cattle sanitation, cattle nutrition, cattle reproduction and cattle management. Finally, for production and productivity, we construct indicators from self-reported and administrative data, such as, daily milk production (liters), daily milk production per cow (liters), bi-weekly milk delivery to milk company (liters). The sample size is 549 milk producers in the Bolivian Plateau organized in 52 delivery points (modules). We stratify our sample by municipality and number of farmers in delivery points (module size). Then, we randomly assign half of the modules to either treatment or control groups.