Overview
FRI proposed to strengthen the local radio capacities and agricultural content that is broadcasted to the farmers at critical stages of agricultural production. FRI worked with other consortium partners that have developed content for farmer training to package the content for radio as well as to identify local agriculture experts for question-and-answer sessions. FRI proposed to strengthen the capacity of radio stations and key stakeholder groups to plan, deliver, monitor & manage quality interactive rural radio (IRR) programming to deliver knowledge on technologies for increased crop productivity and resilience as well as knowledge on inputs and markets across the value chain.
Agresearch Lead was contracted to conduct the endline evaluation of the Farm Radio International Interventions implemented between 2020-2022. The project was implemented in AGRA communities located in four regions namely; Northern, Bono East, Upper East and Upper West regions. This evaluation targeted two regions (Northern and Bono East), six districts (Tamale metro, Sagnarigu, Yendi, Savelugu, Atebubu, Techiman South and Nkoranza South)
Technical Approach
The standard OECD-DAC criteria were considered in this Endline evaluation. The evaluation questions were developed by using the following criteria:
- Relevance: The extent to which project interventions are consistent with recipients’ requirements, country needs, global priorities and partners’ policies.
- Effectiveness: The extent to which the objectives were achieved, or are expected to be achieved, taking into account their relative importance.
- Efficiency: A measure of how economically resources/inputs (funds, expertise, time, equipment, etc.) are converted into results.
- Impact: Positive and negative primary and secondary long-term effects produced by the interventions, whether directly or indirectly, intended or unintended.
- Sustainability: The continuation of benefits from the interventions after major development assistance has ceased. Interventions must be both environmentally and financially sustainable. Where the emphasis is not on external assistance, sustainability can be defined as the ability of key stakeholders to sustain intervention benefits after the cessation of donor funding with efforts that use locally available resources
Difference-in-Differences (DID) analysis was used to analyze data from a non-equivalent comparison group and compare the endline to the baseline to make a causal inference about an independent variable.
In designing RAISE’s impact on beneficiaries (listeners), we should sufficiently understand whether RAISE’s impact on beneficiaries was due to any other factors. Ironically, the impact evaluation design of the project has the inherent problem of missing data, because one cannot observe the outcomes of beneficiaries without information on the counterfactual. The first option is to compare RAISE’s impact on beneficiaries (listeners) with those of a control group (non-listeners) that did not listen to the program. In this instance, we picked a comparison group that is very similar to the treated group such that those in the treatment group would have had outcomes similar to those in the comparison group in the absence of treatment
The project targeted listeners of agricultural related programs which educated farmers on farm related activities such as the use of fertilizers, weather forecast and planting methods, etc.
The mixed method of data collection was used where 240 listeners and non-listeners were interviewed in the Northern region and 162 in the Bono East region as quantitative data was collected using the Kobo Collect software. In relation to the qualitative data, Agricultural extension officers were interviewed as key informants and also Focus Group Discussions were conducted in each district.
Stakeholders
Tasks carried out:
The activities the team carried out were;
- Organized inception meeting with partner.
- Reviewed project documents such as baseline, midline reports, project M&E frameworks, indicator performance tracking table.
- Reviewed quantitative instruments and making inputs towards finalization.
- Developed qualitative instruments such as FGD and KII guides.
- Programmed questionnaires using Kobo collect.
- Human resource and logistics arrangements for training workshop and data collection.
- Implementation of training plan (for enumerators, supervisors and core team members).
- Technical implementation of data collection plan and survey protocols in the Northern and Bono East regions.
- Field coordination and debriefing sessions.
- Data collation, cleaning and analysis.
- Prepared draft report, reviewed comments from stakeholder and finalized report as part of deliverables.