SurveyCTO Presentation Series: Boosting Agriculture Productivity and Revenue Through Farmer Support

SurveyCTO has proudly awarded Primary Data Collection grants to up-and-coming researchers since 2021. And in this month’s webinar, we’re excited to showcase the groundbreaking research of two of 2022’s awardees

In addition to these two awardees for our 2022 research grant, SurveyCTO awarded partial grants to 10 additional researchers. In this webinar, we feature two researchers from that cohort: Matilde Grácio, Economics PhD candidate at the Nova School of Business and Economics in Portugal, and Guanghong Xu, Economics PhD candidate at the University of California, Santa Cruz, United States. Matilde and Guanghong will present on their respective research projects that were designed to improve outcomes for farmers.

Matilde’s project is called “Evaluating the impact of a support hotline for cashew producers in Guinea-Bissau.” It focuses on understanding the role of access to information in determining cashew producer’s choices on when to sell their harvest in Guinea-Bissau. Matilde’s project provided personalized information through a hotline service to farmers, and explored different focal points within communities to maximize the spread of information during the commercialization periods of the cashew nut.

Guanghong’s project is called “Farm to Fridge: Digital Traceability and Quality Upgrading in Kenyan Dairy Value Chain.” This project explores a sustainable way for quality incentives transmission along the value chain. Guanghong  worked to establish a traceability system to reduce asymmetric information on quality and add accountability in the Kenyan dairy industry. He conducted a Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) to study the effects of providing quality-type information via a traceability system on buyers’ contracting practices with different types of producers, producers’ investment in quality upgrading, their milk quality, production, and sales.