Empowering Agriculturalists through Structured Experimentation

Agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa faces a problem of low adoption of modern inputs, technologies, and techniques. This has two important consequences. First, yields are low, contributing to poverty and underdevelopment.

Second, climate adaptation – which necessitates the adoption of new capital-intensive, low-emissions, robust approaches – is slowed.We argue that a crucial contributor to this problem is the learning problem. It is fundamentally hard for farmers to learn what are the optimal inputs for their farm.

As a result, they may not learn at all.We propose a packaged program to solve this problem, Empowering Agriculturalists through Structured Experimentation (EASE).

The goal is to teach farmers to conduct structured agricultural experiments on their own land, and document the results in a structured way. This can reveal what inputs work best for them.

In essence, it empowers smallholder farmers to identify for themselves how best to run their farm, rather than having to rely on outside advisors or for-profit input suppliers.The project will evaluate the impact of the EASE program through a large-scale Randomized Controlled Trial in Eastern Uganda.

We evaluate its impacts on learning about a new input, which the participants choose for themselves, as well as about how farmers adapt their general approach to learning and experimentation.

By evaluating the impacts, as well as the costs of the program, we can develop a proven intervention ready to be offered at scale.