Extension Services, Production and Welfare: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Ethiopia

The paper assesses the impact of a small-scale agricultural extension project implemented in rural Ethiopia and aimed at introducing the culti- vation of horticultural gardens along with some innovative techniques, products and inputs. Our main outcome of interest is the level of adoption of new horticultural products. We also assess the consequent impacts on the level of revenues from sale and diet diversification. We use a mixed impact evaluation design combining across-villages comparisons, through difference-in-differences estimations, with a within village randomized control trial. To this aim, we make use of micro-data collected through surveys administered to 602 households in two time periods (2013 and 2014). We find that the project contributes to production diversification as the number of house- holds growing vegetables increases by about 30%. Overall, such changes do not seem to in uence in a relevant way the total revenues from sales of agricultural products and do not consequently affect household welfare. We do not find significant changes in the consumption of vegetables and only marginal increase in fruit uptake. This leads to an overall irrelevant impact on diet diversification.