Enhancing Smallholder Farmers Income and Food Security through Agricultural Research and Development in West Africa: Impact of the IAR4D1 in the KKM PLS

The Integrated Agricultural Research for Development (IAR4D) is the approach suggested by the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA) through the sub Saharan Africa Challenge Programme (SSA CP) to address the acknowledged shortcoming of African Agricultural Research and Development’s (ARD) failure to achieve impact on the farmer’s field. The IAR4D concept is being implemented in three Pilot Learning Sites (PLS) in eight countries across the continent. This paper focused on the Kano, Katsina and Maradi (KKM) PLS of the West Africa aspect of the programme, and made use of a panel data collected from 1800 households at both the baseline and midline surveys organized using the quasi experimental approach with two sets of counterfactuals, viz: the conventional (traditional ARD), and the clean sites where it was assumed there was no ARD at least two years prior to the commencement of the IAR4D. Using propensity score (PSM) and double-difference methods (DDM) to control for project placement and self selection biases, results show that IAR4D increased participants’ income by about 139%, and improved food security by about 229%. The PSM results indicated that participants in the IAR4D will likely be farmers with small household size, and considerable farming experience, with some level of productive assets, who reside near all weather roads, have low level of education and are more likely to reside in the Northern Guinea Savanna agro-ecological zone but less likely from the Sudan Savanna agro-ecological zone. It can be safely concluded from the results that the IAR4D enhances the income and food security status of the participants.