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Narrator’s Gender A/B Test, Nigeria
-21 -1656Last modified on December 19th, 2025 at 10:41 am
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Abstract
PxD delivers free agricultural advisory services to Rural Poor Stimulus Facility (RPSF) recipients in Nigeria through automated voice calls, in partnership with the Federal Ministry of Agriculture & Rural Development (FMARD). The project provided agronomic advice in the 2021 dry and wet seasons to 107,542 smallholder farmers, in the form of push calls on their mobile phones. With the aim of improving pick-up and call completion rates, we conducted an A/B test to identify the gender of the narrator that is most effective in driving farmer engagement with the push-call content.
The messages were recorded by both female and male narrators. Farmers were randomly assigned to two treatment groups (T1 and T2). T1 received advisory messages recorded by a male narrator, while T2 received messages recorded by a female narrator. Narrator gender influenced listening behavior. In week 2, female farmers were 3.8 percentage points (pp) more likely to pick up calls when messages were voiced by a female narrator (over a 46.5% control mean), while no such effect was observed in male farmers. Conversely, male farmers who received messages from a female narrator listened to 1.39% more of the content on average (over a 51.8% control mean), with statistically significant improvements observed in four of the seven weeks. However, narrator gender had no effect on how much of the content female farmers listened to. -
Status
Completed
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Start date
Q2 Jun 2021
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End date
Q3 Aug 2021
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Experiment Location
Nigeria
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Partner Organization
International Fund for Agricultural Development
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Agricultural season
Wet Season
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Experiment type
A/B test
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Sample frame / target population
Rural Poor Stimulus Facility (RPSF) recipients smallholder farmers that received audio content on millet, sorghum, soybean, groundnut, cabbage and cowpea.
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Sample size
45,162
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Outcome type
Information access, Service engagement
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Mode of data collection
PxD administrative data
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Research question(s)
Does the narrator’s gender of push calls affect farmers’ platform engagement (i.e., pick-up and completion rates)?
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Research theme
Communication technology, Gender, Message narration
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Research Design
We analyzed the difference in pick-up and listening rates between the following two groups:
- Treatment group 1 (T1) “Male narrator” (n = 22,730): Received content narrated by a male.
- Treatment group 2 (T2) “Female narrator” (n = 22,943): Received content narrated by a female.
The intervention was randomized at the individual level and stratified based on the farmer’s gender, state of residence, crop, and source of data for the original farmer lists.
The content was recorded in Hausa language by male and female narrators. Farmers had the option to call back if they had missed the initial call or wanted to listen to the message again. When farmers called back, they received the content delivered by the assigned narrator.
The duration of the experiment was seven weeks (from week 1 to week 7 of the Nigerian wet season push calls).
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Results
Female farmers were more likely to pick up calls with audio content recorded in a female voice, but these effects are not statistically significant. This finding aligns with the findings from our feedback survey that some married female farmers reported that they refused to pick up subsequent calls because they had heard a male voice in the first week. We find no significant effect of the narrator’s gender on the probability of male farmers picking up the push calls.
The voice gender affected the male farmers’ propensity to listen to more of the push call content after picking up. Sending the audio content in a female narrator’s voice positively and sustainably increased the likelihood that male farmers listened to more of the content. However, the narrator’s gender had no significant effect on the probability of female farmers listening to more of the audio content. Male farmers in the Female narrator group listened to 1.39% more of the agronomic content overall compared to male farmers in the Male narrator group with a mean of 51.81%. Specifically, in weeks 1, 3, 5, and 6 of push calls, male farmers in the Female narrator group listened to 2.24%, 2.23%, 2.15%, and 4.24% more of the audio messages, compared to male farmers in the Male narrator group. Male farmers in this setting are, therefore, more receptive to female narrators than to male narrators, as shown by the significant and positive effect on male farmers’ listening rates overall.