Experimental Design
This experiment will evaluate the impacts of addressing an important constraint that limits agricultural incomes among smallholder dairy farmers: credit. We have partnered with two dairy cooperatives in Kenya and their corresponding financial institutions (SACCOs) to implement a randomized control trial among dairy farmers in the Rift Valley of Kenya. We will offer interested, eligible participants an asset-collateralized loan for a water storage tank.
Partner cooperatives will communicate information to their members about a new lending program for water tank loans. Following this communications campaign, we will call members to conduct a pre-screening for interest in taking an asset-collateralized loan for a water tank. Our primary experimental sample will consist of the first 1,500 eligible, interested members identified by the cooperatives.
Among this sample, we will conduct an in-person baseline survey. We will then randomize this sample at the household level into a treatment group which will be invited to apply for an asset-collateralized loan for a water tank (n = 750) and a control group which will receive no additional loan access (n = 750). Farmers in the treatment group will be randomly assigned to receive either an offer of a standard declining balance loan or an income-sharing loan with required monthly payments determined as a function of milk income. We will stratify the randomization on SACCO, agroecological zone, and characteristics in the baseline survey and/or administrative data that strongly predict milk production and sales.