Cost-effectiveness of community-based gendered advisory services to farmers: Analysis in Mozambique and Tanzania
This discussion paper (PDF) by IFPRI conducts cost-effectiveness analyses of interventions that bring a gender lens to community-based advisory services in rural areas. Cost-effectiveness analysis subjects both the cost side and the effects side of agricultural interventions to technical scrutiny and unifies both sides in order to compare the relative cost-effectiveness of different modalities of a program, of efforts to reach different target groups or achieve different outcomes. Specifically, the study considers two programs: one in Mozambique in which such advisory services aim to improve sustainable land management practices, and the other in Tanzania to advise farmers on their land rights. The former enables the comparison of two modalities: a gender-sensitive and a basic modality. It was found that the gendered modality is consistently more cost-effective than the basic modality when considering varied outcomes and target groups. However, both studies show it is more cost-effective to improve outcomes for men than for women. This may be due to gender differentials in the depth of knowledge and literacy at the outset. Further a simulation of how cost-effectiveness would change if the program were scaled up geographically shows that expansion of the basic modality of the sustainable land management program leads to improvements in cost-effectiveness. Inconsistently, the gendered modality displays nonlinear changes in cost-effectiveness along the expansion path, first worsening with initial scale-up and subsequently improving with further expansion.