Periodic Reporting for period 2 - AGRIMKT (Improving Market Access for Farmers: Evidence from East Africa)
Reporting period: 2022-07-01 to 2023-12-31
In this proposal, I outline a research program that focuses on improving farmers’ market access in East Africa. The research builds on the expertise I have developed on these topics over the last ten years.
The research program consists of three related projects. In Project A, we use a randomized experiment to evaluate the impact of a holistic approach to improve market access: contract farming. We work in partnership with several agribusinesses in East Africa to conduct a randomized evaluation of contract farming, varying contract types at the village level.
In Project B, we study how to increase demand for crop insurance among smallholders. Building on previous successful experimental work, we examine the potential of pay-at-harvest crop insurance to raise insurance adoption and to foster sustained insurance demand over multiple crop seasons.
In Project C, we combine land registry data from East Africa with several other data sources to study the determinants and impact of land market access.
The research program will generate new insights on how to improve access to key markets for agricultural producers. We expect the findings of the study will generate high interest among academics, development practitioners, and policymakers.
Project B aims to study whether and why changing the timing of premium payment can increase take up of crop insurance among smallholders. After several months of delay due to the COVID-19 pandemics, we resumed activities for this project in late 2021. In the first half of 2022, we developed a partnership with the Ugandan Agricultural Insurance Consortium (https://aic.ug/) which manages all the crop-insurance related projects in the country. AIC and the researchers have identified several agricultural offtakers who are interested in offering crop insurance to the farmers they are contracting with. As a result of these successful scoping activities, we are planning to launch the full-scale randomized evaluation in the first crop season of 2024.
Project C aims to study the dynamics of land markets development in East Africa. We have made substantial progress on this project. We have developed an official collaboration both with the Kenyan Ministry of Lands and Physical Planning and with the Uganda Ministry of Lands, Housing and Urban Development to get access to their administrative data, either by acquiring already digitized records or by newly digitizing other records. We are also preparing additional datasets, including rainfall data and satellite data on land usage.
Finally, I was invited to write a review piece (coauthored with my long-term collaborator Jack Willis) for a special issue of the Oxford Review of Economic Policy on microfinance. We are writing an article of “Value Chain Microfinance”, which is directly related to the topics of ERC Grant. We are covering, among other issues, contract farming and crop insurance, the subjects of Project A and B of the ERC grant.
Project B will shed light on the potential of pay-at-harvest insurance to address two well-known challenges in financial market access for poor smallholders: take-up of crop insurance and sustained adoption over multiple crop seasons.
Project C leverages administrative land registry data, an important advancement in the study of land markets in Sub-Saharan Africa, which so far has primarily relied on survey data.