Kenya Fall Armyworm Trial 2019
KEN -19 -1391Last modified on October 29th, 2025 at 12:04 pm
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Abstract
One Acre Fund (OAF) is an agricultural service provider that provides support for smallholder farmers in Africa to access agricultural inputs, training, and markets, to help the farmers increase their harvests and income. PAD and OAF began collaborating in 2016 on efforts to increase adoption of agricultural inputs and improve OAF operations in Kenya and Rwanda. PAD operates the MoA-INFO platform in collaboration with Kenya’s Ministry of Agriculture to provide free agricultural recommendations to farmers via SMS.
In this project PAD and OAF provided information on Fall Armyworm (FAW) to OAF farmers via SMS. OAF invited its members to access information about FAW on PAD’s two-way MoA-INFO SMS platform. The OAF farmers who registered on the platform were randomly assigned to receive different volumes and types of messages. OAF conducted a follow-up phone survey after the farming season, which allowed us to quantify the effects of the service on farmer knowledge and practices.
Treatment-group farmers who received push messages and reminders about the platform were 125% more likely to access the FAW menu compared to control-group farmers. Farmers’ knowledge about FAW was positively associated with the SMS service, although this effect was not statistically significant in most cases. Knowledge improvements were significant for some topics that control farmers understood at low levels. Similarly, the SMS intervention had (mostly insignificant) positive effects on farmers’ adoption of recommended practices. The probabilities of treatment farmers sharing the information with and recommending the platform to other group members were high. -
Status
Completed
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Start date
Q1 Mar 2019
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End date
Q3 Jul 2019
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Experiment Location
Kenya
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Partner Organization
One Acre Fund (OAF)
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Agricultural season
Long Rains
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Experiment type
Other
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Sample frame / target population
OAF farmers
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Sample size
296,252
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Outcome type
Farming practices, Knowledge, Information access, Service engagement
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Mode of data collection
PxD administrative data
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Research question(s)/hypotheses
What is the effect of MoA-INFO's FAW information on farmers’ knowledge and practices?
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Research theme
Communication technology, Pest management
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Research design notes
OAF farmers were invited to register on the MoA-INFO platform in March 2019 at the beginning of the long rainy season in Western Kenya. The invitations were sent to 296,252 farmers in 18,471 groups. Invited farmers were randomized into a control group and three treatment groups:
C—No Push (Control): On completing the registration, farmers were introduced to the keywords MENU and CHECK; farmers were neither reminded of these keywords nor introduced to the FAW misconception messages (Keyword: TRUTH) and the FAW quiz (Keyword: QUIZ).
T1—Info Push: Farmers received the control keywords after registration; farmers received push message reminders to access the menu, the misconception messages, and the FAW quiz.
T2—Tool Push: Farmers received the control keywords after registration; farmers received push message reminders to monitor crops using the interactive monitoring tool (Keyword: CHECK).
T3—All Push: Farmers received the control keywords after registration; farmers received all the push message reminders.The randomization was conducted at the OAF farmer-group level. Farmers in the treatment groups received the various push messages from March to July 2019. After the SMS campaign was completed, OAF conducted a phone survey to gather information and feedback from a sub-sample of farmers, from July to September 2019. The survey sample was randomly drawn from farmers in the no push group (C), info push group (T1), and all push group (T3).
The trial also included a series of four smaller A/B tests implemented during the season referred to as “Blast experiments” which can be viewed: Fall Armyworm Blast Experiments: Names, Active Language, Proverbs, & Quiz Scores
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Results
We examined the impact of our SMS intervention on four groups of outcomes: (1) farmers’ use of the SMS platform, (2) farmers’ knowledge about FAW, (3) farmer’s practices of preventing, monitoring, and managing FAW, and (4) farmers’ information-sharing and satisfaction with the platform. For most outcomes, we observed the treatment effects in the direction that was consistent with our hypotheses that push messages would boost farmers’ use of the platform, increase farmer’s knowledge about FAW, and lead to a higher adoption of recommended practices. However, most effect sizes were modest and they were not always statistically significant. The following is a selection of these findings:
1. Farmers’ use of the SMS platform: Treatment-group farmers were 125% more likely to access the FAW menu compared to control-group farmers (37.8% of treatment-group farmers accessed the menu compared to 16.8% of farmers in the control group). This difference was statistically significant at the 1% level.
2. Farmers' knowledge about FAW: The treatment group had a 1.3 percentage point (pp) increase in the proportion of farmers who answered at least one of the knowledge questions correctly and a 15.5 pp increase in the number of knowledge questions answered correctly. However, these were not statistically significant.
3. Farmers' practices of preventing, monitoring, and managing FAW: Farmers in the control group and in the treatment groups had equal probabilities of observing FAW, at approximately 53%.
4. Farmers' satisfaction with the platform: 92% of treatment farmers would recommend this SMS platform to their OAF groups.