Abstract
•Ineffective extension systems limit agricultural development in sub-Saharan Africa.•We analyze the impacts of Agricultural Stakeholder Panels (ASPs) on lead farmer visits in Malawi.•We used endogenous treatment effect regression to analyze original survey data from 2134 households across 22 districts in Malawi.•The ASP approach improved lead farmer visits by eight visits per farming season in 2018.•ASPs can enhance extension systems and improve agricultural development in Malawi.
Agricultural extension is critical to economic transformation in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Yet, the local extension services remain weak, despite several decades of international aid aimed at improving extension services in the region. Agricultural Stakeholder Panels (ASPs) are a demand-side extension approach to improving rural extension services by enhancing farmer interaction with local extension agents. In Malawi, the ASP approach has been in rural communities as part of the national extension policy for more than two decades. Yet, most ASPs were not functional and lacked effectiveness in their purpose. Thus, in 2015, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) funded the Strengthening Agricultural and Nutrition Extension (SANE) project to support the government of Malawi in implementing ASPs more carefully and rigorously and thereby improve agricultural extension services in the country. However, empirical evidence of the impacts of functional ASPs on improving agricultural extension services remains unexplored. This study applies an endogenous treatment effect regression to original survey data from 2134 households across 22 districts in rural Malawi to estimate the impacts of functional ASPs on lead farmer visits (local extension service providers) in Malawi in 2018. We found positive and statistically significant impacts of functional ASPs on lead farmer visits: Farmers associated with such ASPs received eight extension visits from lead farmers compared to other farmers per year, a significant result with crucial implications for improving extension services in Malawi. The result implies that effective ASPs can improve the performance of extension systems through lead farmer visits and demonstrates the importance of such policies in improving agricultural extension systems in Malawi and similar contexts elsewhere in SSA and beyond.
