Methodological issues of an impact evaluation of development support in agriculture

We attempted to investigate the impacts on enterprise performance of two agricultural subsidy projects carried out by the BTC-Benin in 2008-2015. During the working process we encountered several problems. First, the data on the activities of entrepreneurs is incomplete and of poor quality. Second, there are various methodological problems related to the design of the projects that do not allow a clear identification of control and treatment groups for the projects. As a result, we cannot infer any observed difference in performance of entrepreneurs to the project. We were therefore not able to assess the impact of these past projects. Instead, we successfully launched a collaboration with BTC-Benin to design a randomized impact evaluation on a new project that started in January 2016.(download)

R. Houssa