IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/29518.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Harvesting the Rain: The Adoption of Environmental Technologies in the Sahel

Author

Listed:
  • Jenny C. Aker
  • Kelsey Jack

Abstract

Many agricultural and environmental technologies require large upfront investments in exchange for longer-term benefits. This time profile of costs and benefits makes adoption particularly sensitive to liquidity and credit constraints, which are prevalent in low-income settings. We test the importance of these barriers to the adoption of an agricultural technique that helps reduce land degradation and restore soil fertility in Niger. We find little evidence that liquidity or credit constraints deter adoption: instead, providing farmers with training increases the share of adopters by over 90 percentage points, whereas adding conditional or unconditional cash transfers has no additional effect. Adoption increases agricultural output, reduces land turnover and leads to adoption spillovers up to three years after treatment. These results imply that training can be a cost-effective and scalable means of promoting the adoption of profitable technologies.

Suggested Citation

  • Jenny C. Aker & Kelsey Jack, 2021. "Harvesting the Rain: The Adoption of Environmental Technologies in the Sahel," NBER Working Papers 29518, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29518
    Note: DEV EEE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w29518.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Beattie, Graham & Ding, Iza & La Nauze, Andrea, 2022. "Is there an energy efficiency gap in China? Evidence from an information experiment," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 115(C).
    2. Mahadevan, Meera & Meeks, Robyn & Yamano, Takashi, 2023. "Reducing information barriers to solar adoption: Experimental evidence from India," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 120(C).
    3. B. Kelsey Jack & Seema Jayachandran & Namrata Kala & Rohini Pande, 2022. "Money (Not) to Burn: Payments for Ecosystem Services to Reduce Crop Residue Burning," NBER Working Papers 30690, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    4. Djenontin, Ida N.S. & Ligmann-Zielinska, Arika & Zulu, Leo C., 2022. "Landscape-scale effects of farmers’ restoration decision making and investments in central Malawi: an agent-based modeling approach," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 115672, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • O13 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Agriculture; Natural Resources; Environment; Other Primary Products
    • Q16 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Agriculture - - - R&D; Agricultural Technology; Biofuels; Agricultural Extension Services

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29518. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.