Choice Experiment to Understand Farmer Preferences for Technology Adoption
ACAI is carrying out a choice experiment exercise that is meant to help the project team understand the socioeconomic factors that influence cassava farmers’ readiness to adopt and use the decision support tools that the project is developing.
The experiment is a joint initiative between IITA, Tanzania Agricultural Research Institute, TARI, and the University of KU Leuven, Belgium. In the course of September and October, enumerators working with ACAI IITA staff and partners will participate in collecting data at household level from farmers working with ACAI.
Results from the experiment are expected to help the project predict and drive an efficient adoption campaign. The experiment will be looking at farmers’ willingness to intensify cassava farming and the motivation behind the willingness. The participating farmers will be taken through prepared choice experiment to select cassava growing and selling options under different circumstances with varying positive and negative outcomes.
George Sonda from Tanzania Agricultural Research Institute Ukiriguru, shows the choice cards to a cassava farmer in Mkuranga, Tanzania where ACAI performed the test trial of the experiment.
ACAI is pioneering the choice experiment as a technique that will inform critical and strategic decisions for development of the dissemination strategy. Dr Pieter Pypers, IITA’s senior Agronomist and the ACAI project leader says it is “important to gain an insight into the demographic characteristics of the targeted population in order to package the decision support tool based on the finding.”
Choice experiments are famous for introducing new products in the market with a very high success rate for predicting and estimating customer behavior. ACAI is developing six decision support tools aimed at addressing specific challenges facing cassava grower that will be rolled out in Nigeria and Tanzania before finally being scaled to Ghana, DR Congo and Uganda.
To prepare for the exercise, ACAI project team held a workshop in Dar es Salaam with a team of social economists from the Tanzania Agricultural Research Institute, TARI, to craft the choice card for use in the experiment and to develop the work plan for the exercise. Leading the workshop was Dr Pypers and IITA’s systems agronomist Dr Veronica NE Uzokwe who is also ACAI coordinator for East Africa. Others at the planning workshop included Audrey Vanderghinste from KU Leuven, Dr George Sonda from TARI, Ukiriguru station, Laurent Aswile from Illonga and and Bakari Kidunda from TARI Naliendele research station in Mtwara.
The exercise will start officially on the 26th of September engaging a number of households that ACAI has on the baseline study database.