technology adoption

A five-season field experiment with smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa shows that new agricultural technologies are hard to adopt not because farmers lack information, but because such technologies require multiple interdependent decisions that take years of costly trial and error to get right.

Drawing on a randomised controlled trial among rice farmers in Nigeria, we introduce a new method for linking village-level interventions with high-resolution earth observation data – which captures spatial variation in how new technologies spread an...

Despite the potential of solar power in sub-Saharan Africa, many rural households opt for low-quality solar products due to lack of affordability and information. A field experiment in Senegal shows that third-party certificates and warranties increa...

The most remote villages in Northern Tanzania pay 40–55% more for fertiliser than villages with better market access. Halving travel costs leads to a nearly fourfold increase in fertiliser adoption.

Previous research finds that peer-to-peer learning can successfully promote technology adoption, making participatory approaches that emphasise iterative, two-way communication now common in agricultural development. We examine whether this peer lear...

Experimental evidence from rural Malawi shows that women's reputation concerns within households can lead to underinvestment in new technologies and persistence with bad ones. Engaging both spouses and/or equipping women to effectively communicate th...

Technological improvements alone are unlikely to modernise agriculture if farmers are uncertain about the quality of new innovations

The prevalence of fixed prices can explain the low adoption of efficient irrigation technology, but incentivising farmers to convert to marginal pricing does not reduce water usage

The rich-world bias of agricultural innovation explains a large share of global disparities in technology adoption and agricultural productivity