Conservation Agriculture Evaluation Project in Northern Ghana: a formative evaluation using a framed field experiment

While conservation agriculture (CA) provides public benefits, farmers adopting CA do not usually reap immediate private benefits. Since it takes time for organic matter to build up in the soil, productivity gains are not immediately realised. Farmers adopting CA, therefore, typically face an immediate cost for a potentially uncertain future benefit; hence, adoption rates in Africa have been low.

Given that there is a public good component to CA and potential private benefits to adopters in the medium-term, one method of reducing farmers’ perceived risk of CA techniques is to provide incentives for adopting CA. Within this context,  Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) and  International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) collaborated with The Ghana Agricultural Sector Investment Programme (GASIP), a programme within Ghana’s Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA), to design and implement a framed field experiment (FFE) that incentivised farmers to take up CA practices.