AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

No single constraint can explain the stagnant agricultural productivity growth in sub-Saharan Africa. Investments in the agricultural sector in many African countries—most of which focus on relaxing individual barriers to productivity at a time—have yielded considerable evidence on what fails and a limited catalog of successes.

We address this issue in two pieces of research. The first is a VoxDevLit, which reviews the literature on technology adoption in Africa. This wiki-inspired literature review highlights the importance of heterogeneity in both gross and net returns to agricultural technologies across the African continent. We argue that this variation makes it difficult for farmers to adopt new technologies, limits the impact of many innovations, and plays a role in the lack of progress in technology use.

In the second project, we evaluate an at-scale program that targets several productivity constraints at once. The program, run by the NGO One Acre Fund, does so with a bundled intervention. Our study is based on a randomized controlled trial in western Kenya. We find that program participation increases maize yields by 26%, total maize output by 24%, and profits by 17%. While we cannot directly test whether the program’s success is due to its bundled nature, we find patterns in the data that are consistent with this hypothesis.

POST-MARITAL RESIDENCE AND FEMALE WELLBEING

How much do deep-rooted cultural institutions impact contemporaneous individual outcomes? Economists have recently started paying much greater scrutiny to this broad question. Building on earlier ethnographic studies, a growing literature in economics has quantitatively studied the impacts of various cultural institutions on a range of outcomes of interest. A relatively less explored institutional setup concerns rules governing residential arrangement after marriage. These systems of post-marital residence determine whether a newly married couple resides with the bride’s family (matrilocality), groom’s family (patrilocality), or sets up their own separate household (neolocality).

We explore the relationship between post-marital residence norms and female autonomy and domestic violence outcomes. We focus on four Southeast Asian countries –Indonesia, Philippines, Cambodia, and Myanmar – where a sizable proportion of the population practices each type of marital residence. We show that compared to neolocal families within the same province-country, married women in patrilocal households have worse autonomy outcomes while women in matrilocal households fare substantially better. This aligns well with an anthropological understanding of how gendered patterns of influence in a social system might potentially impact female empowerment. On the other hand, we observe that married women in non-neolocal households suffer from less frequent domestic abuse compared to women residing in neolocal households, likely due to a deterrence effect from the presence of other family members.

Results highlight the challenge of boosting vaccine uptake in late stages of a pandemic

ADDRESSING VACCINE HESITANCY USING LOCAL AMBASSADORS: A RANDOMIZED CONTROLLED TRIAL IN INDONESIA

In settings where resistance and rampant misinformation against vaccines exist, the prospect of containing infectious diseases remains a challenge. Can delivery of information regarding the benefits of vaccination through personal home visits by local ambassadors increase vaccine uptake?

We conduct a door-to-door randomized information campaign targeted towards COVID-19 unvaccinated individuals in rural Indonesia. We recruited ambassadors from local villages tasked to deliver information about COVID-19 vaccines and promote vaccination through one-on-one meetings, using an interpersonal behavioral change communication approach. To investigate which type of ambassador—health cadres, influential individuals, and laypersons—is the most effective, we randomly vary the type of ambassador that delivers the information at the village level.

We find that the overall vaccination take-up is quite moderate and that there are no differences in vaccination outcomes across the treatment groups. These results highlight the challenge of boosting vaccine uptake in late stages of a pandemic.