CEDE Seminar - Jessica Leight

Adoption of climate-smart agricultural practices that can reduce land degradation and buffer households vis-a-vis intensifying weather fluctuations is notably low in sub-Saharan Africa, and one underexplored constraint in a context of thin labor markets and restrictive gender norms is the ability to optimally allocate labor within a spousal unit.  This randomized trial in rural Ethiopia explores the salience of this constraint in the context of a bundled intervention providing training and inputs to encourage uptake of fruit trees intercropped with home gardens, and fertilized with compost.  Clusters were randomly assigned to a pure control arm or one of two intervention arms: in the first arm, the intervention was targeted to women alone while in the second arm it was targeted to couples, with both spouses also engaged in a joint planning exercise to optimize labor allocations.  The findings suggest that the bundled intervention on average increased the probability of adoption of CSA by at least 50%.  In general, these effects are symmetric across treatment arms, but for composting --- the most time- and strength-intensive practice --- the effects are significantly larger in the couples' arm for households identified as non-cooperative at baseline, suggesting that optimal intrahousehold allocation of labor may be a meaningful constraint for effective adoption in this subsample.