Speaker
Description
Introduction
Rural development remains crucial to enhancing welfare and eradicating poverty, yet, numerous obstacles, such as climate change and market failures, hinder the achievement of these goals globally, especially in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) (Shimeles et al. 2018). Hence, strategies that enable farmers to strengthen their resilience, including those related to disseminating information, are key to improving their well-being (McKune et al. 2018).
Improving information access can help farmers to become more resilient by improving their adaptation to changing contexts (Ramos-Sandoval et al. 2016). For example, climate information can help farmers adjust their practices to seasonal climatic projections and increase production (Patt et al. 2005). Moreover, access to market information is associated with greater integration of farmers into markets, positively affecting their income and food security levels (Dorward et al. 2004). Nonetheless, the effective and efficient dissemination of information presents a significant challenge in developing nations.
Identifying which sources of information are most effective in delivering the message is essential in designing policies that aim to support farmers through the dissemination of information because farmers perceive some sources as more reliable than others (Amoak et al. 2023) and because some information requires tools and practices that only specific sources of information can provide. For example, information delivered in the form of extension services increases technical efficiency in Bangladesh (Biswas et al. 2021), and Short Message-based Services (SMS) increase agricultural productivity in SSA (Samson Sennuga et al. 2020).
Most studies focusing on the type or sources of information and rural development primarily seek to understand the effect of information and communication technologies on adopting new agricultural practices, especially those related to climate change and smart agriculture (Boyd et al. 2013; Amadu 2022). Although some suggest that information is positively associated with resilience (Boyd et al. 2013; Amoak et al. 2023), to the best of our knowledge, the effect of type or source of information on resilience has never been measured empirically.
Given the increasing uncertainties in the market, climate, and political scenarios, timely and effective access to adequate information is critical to enable farmers to cope with and adapt to adverse shocks and stressors. The main research questions of our paper are: (1) What are the most effective sources of information to improve resilience among coffee farmers in Rwanda? (2) How can different types of information be better communicated and delivered to enhance farmers’ resilience? (3) Do certifications play a role in increasing resilience through improving access to information?
Finally, our study contributes to the research literature as follows: (1) provides empirical evidence using a unique panel dataset from coffee farmers in Rwanda; (2) explores different information channels to capture access and quality of information to then measure long-term welfare effects (captured by resilience) and short-term welfare effect (captured by per capita income); (3) uses a novel method to measure resilience.
Data and Methodology
We follow the conceptual framework for resilience developed by Barrett and Constas (2014) and the subsequent conditional moments-based approach introduced by Cissé and Barrett (2018) to explore the relationship between farmers’ development resilience and the source and type of information they can access.
Cissé and Barrett (2018) propose to first estimate a conditional moment function for well-being as a polynomial function of lagged well-being and a vector of household characteristics, including potential shock exposures. Then, this approach requires computing the conditional mean and the conditional variance to estimate the household-and-period-specific conditional well-being probability density function and the associated complementary cumulative density function (ccdf). Finally, we can use the ccdf to estimate the probability of a household reaching some normative minimum well-being standard, representing resilience. Thus, this approach relies on panel data and a normative threshold representing a minimum well-being standard.
Our paper uses the national poverty line as the normative threshold. The resilience model includes control variables, the farmers’ certification status, and variables indicating whether farmers received information on crop production or markets, as well as the sources, namely neighbors, mobile phones, radio, extension services, cooperatives, or exporters. Our analysis relies on primary data collected from a two-phase stratified random sampling panel survey involving 837 farmers from five districts within Rwanda’s coffee belt. The data collection was conducted between November and February across the years 2022-2023 and 2023-2024, with the stratification criterion being the certification status of farmers.
Key Results
Our results first show that 93% and 98% of the coffee farmers in our sample have access to crop and market information, respectively, but they differ in the sources of information that they use. These results imply that the challenge remains in the quality of information instead of its access. Moreover, our resilience model also suggests that the quality of information, namely the sources that farmers use to get information, is more important in improving development resilience than the information they obtain, meaning that the association between development resilience and the type of information is positively or negatively defined depending mainly on where the information comes from. For example, when farmers obtain information from informal and non-official sources, such as neighbors, this tends to be negatively associated with development resilience. When farmers obtain information from extension services or mobile phones, which are common instruments for delivering official information among coffee farmers in Rwanda, they report higher development resilience. Besides mobile phones and extension services, cooperatives and exporters are important for crop information.
Additionally, our results show a positive association between certification status and increased resilience, as it represents a mechanism of market integration and information channels. Finally, information sources affect household per capita income and development resilience. These last results suggest that information sources are associated with short-term household welfare (income) and long-term household welfare (resilience).
