Commercial Training 2008-2011

The evaluation had the primary objective of measuring the impact of the FBO training program on farmers' farm productivity and crop income. It was based on a randomized phase-in approach, taking advantage of the fact that not all FBOs that were to be part of the program could be trained at the same time, and so implicit in the program design itself was some degree of phasing. At the core of the impact evaluation was a difference-in-difference approach designed to measure the difference in agricultural output between the treatment group (a collection of FBO members who received commercial trainings in 2008 and 2009) and the control group (a collection of FBO members who received commercial trainings a year later). The Farmer-Based Organization (FBO) Survey series is a collection of data designed to evaluate the impact of these trainings on farmers in Ghana. To aid the survey and enable the implementation of the difference-in-difference approach, the FBOs were divided into two batches and each farmer was to be interviewed twice: once at baseline and again after one year. Batch 1 treatment and control farmers were surveyed in November-December 2008 and again in February-April 2010. Batch 2 treatment and control farmers were surveyed in February-April 2010 and again in November 2010-January 2011. In total, approximately 6,000 farmers -- 3,000 in the treatment group and 3,000 in control group -- were surveyed.