Motivational Messages for Extension Workers in Rwanda Tree Program 2018
RWA -18 -1380Last modified on October 29th, 2025 at 12:03 pm
-
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.
Governments in low-income countries rely on embedded community agents to provide frontline services in sectors critical for development such as education, health and agriculture. Understanding how best to motivate these agents, in settings where oversight might be difficult, is critical to improving development outcomes for the communities they serve.
OAF, in collaboration with PAD, conducted a field experiment to evaluate the effect of mobile phone-based motivational messages on the performance of agriculture extension agents in Rwanda.The extension agents were volunteer Farmer Promoters (FPs) at the village level, and paid socio-economic development officers (SEDOs) employed by the government at the cell level (administrative unit in Rwanda one level up from the village). Agents were tasked with mobilizing farmers for a nationwide tree-distribution agroforestry campaign that encouraged farmers to sign up to receive nursery trees and plant them on their farms. We implemented an SMS campaign to nudge agents to register farmers for the campaign and ensure that the farmers arrived on the tree distribution day. The experiment tested the relative effects of messaging FPs, messaging SEDOs, or messaging both the SEDO and FP, for the village in question. We identified the effects of the SMS nudges on FP performance by the share of their target number of farmers who arrived on tree-distribution day.
We find that direct motivational messages to the FP village-level extension agents increased the farmer turnout for the campaign by 5 to 7 percentage points (pp) of the fraction of the target met over the control mean of 90%. Motivational messages sent to SEDO cell-level extension agents had no effect. Our findings demonstrate that non-financial motivational nudges aimed at frontline service-provider agents can improve program outcomes in developing country contexts. Our findings also highlight the promise of mobile phones to improve the delivery of agriculture extension services. -
Status
Completed
-
Start date
Q3 Aug 2018
-
End date
Q4 Nov 2018
-
Experiment Location
Rwanda
-
Partner Organization
One Acre Fund (OAF)
-
Agricultural season
Season A
-
Experiment type
Impact Evaluation
-
Sample frame / target population
Extension agents (farmer promoters & socio-economic development officers)
-
Sample size
3,300
-
Outcome type
Agent performance
-
Mode of data collection
Partner administrative data
-
Research question(s)/hypotheses
Can SMS messages with varying motivational messages and content improve volunteer extension workers’ motivation, job satisfaction, and performance?
-
Research theme
Communication technology, Extension agents, Message framing
-
Research design notes
During the campaign registration period (August–October 2018) FPs were tasked with both mobilizing farmers in their village to register for the distribution campaign and ensuring that registered farmers arrived on the distribution day of the campaign. OAF, in collaboration with PAD, implemented an SMS campaign to nudge FPs and SEDOs to register farmers for this campaign. This experiment tested the relative effects of messaging FPs directly to remind them about the campaign, messaging SEDOs about the campaign, or messaging both the relevant SEDO and the FP for the village in question. Using the randomly assigned variation in which the FPs and SEDOs received the messages, we identified the effects of SMS nudges on FP performance by the share of their target number of farmers who arrived on tree distribution day.
Our sample was drawn from a subset of the villages receiving trees during the 2018 tree distribution campaign. We randomly drew 522 of the cells in the government database of SEDOs to form the sample frame. There were a total of 4,590 villages in the chosen cells and 1,418 of these villages had FPs whose phone numbers were not in the database. We designated these FPs as “no phone FPs” and included them in all appropriate analyses. The remaining 3,172 villages with FPs whose phone numbers were in the government database formed the sample of FPs we randomized.
We randomly assigned cells (and therefore SEDOs) into one of three experimental arms:
1. Control arm: The SEDO responsible for the cell did not receive any messages.
2. Nudge arm: The SEDO received reminder messages to get FPs in their cell to register farmers for the tree campaign.
3. Nudge + target arm: The SEDO received reminder messages to get FPs in their cell to register farmers for the tree campaign and these messages also included explicit mention of the target number of farmers to be registered by FPs in that SEDO’s cell.We cross-randomized the 3,172 FPs who had phone numbers in the government database into one of two groups.
1. Treatment group: Received motivational messages that encouraged the FP to register farmers for the campaign.
2. Control group: Did not receive those motivational messages.Randomization was not stratified by cell treatment status.
Message recipients received a single message per week during the mobilization phase of the campaign until their distribution day. -
Results
Motivational SMS messages to village-level extension agents, FPs, increased the number of farmers mobilized, as a fraction of the village’s target, by 5 to 7 pp over the control mean of 90%. Messages to cell-level extension agents, SEDOs, did not affect overall farmer mobilization. Coefficients on the SEDO treatment dummy variable range from 1 to 3 pp of the village’s overall target, but are not significantly different from zero, in all models.
These results suggest that digital messaging can improve the performance of village-level extension agents who otherwise may receive limited feedback or encouragement.