Lucy Billings, Dan Gilligan, Parthu Kalva, Jessica Leight, Heleene Tambet, Kibret Mamo Bahiru, Michael Mulford and Kalkidan Bekele REGIONAL WORKSHOP SPIR II Learning Event Co-organized by IFPRI, USAID, CARE, ORDA, and World Vision MAY 16, 2023 - 9:00AM TO MAY 17, 2023 - 5:00PM EAT

1. SPIR II RFSA | 2023 Learning Event
SPIR II/HER+ Sustainable Land
Management evaluation
Lucy Billings, Dan Gilligan, Parthu Kalva, Jessica Leight, Heleene Tambet
(IFPRI); Kibret Mamo Bahiru, Michael Mulford (WV); and Kalkidan Bekele
(CARE)

2. Motivation
• Changing climatic conditions and extreme weather events pose risks to the wellbeing of
poor rural households in Ethiopia
• Women may face diferent and sometimes worse risks due to less access to financial resources, limited
livelihood opportunities, and norms that restrict adaptive behaviors
• Strategies to enhance resiliency to extreme weather realizations through sustainable land
management (SLM) include several practices that may improve water retention, soil fertility,
and reduce erosion
• But large-scale quantitive evidence is limited
• Formative research highlights that households adopt some SLM practices (composting and green manuring,
tree planting, bench terracing), but are constrained by limited knowledge and inputs
• These constraints are particularly pronounced for women’s participation
• Lack of time that prevents them from adopting time-intensive practices (e.g. composting) at home
• Labor constraints for certain practices that require physical strength
• Lack of information as it’s often transferred through PW

3. Research questions
1. Does a targeted sustainable land management (SLM)
intervention that provides training and free inputs result in take-
up of the respective technologies, and consequently improved
production systems?
2. Does this effect differ when women are solely targeted for
inclusion, or when they are jointly targeted with their husbands
and trained in adopting the practices?

4. Intervention
• The primary intervention is a 3(-4)-day training encompassing the following topics
• Planting and maintenance of trees
• Preparation and application of compost
• Establishment of home gardens in an agroforestry system
• Bundling these activities has the potential to draw on complementarities in which
composting supports tree growth and survival, home gardens provide inputs for
composting while grown in an intercropped system with trees, and vegetables bring
short-term benefits
• Training will be conducted at kebele-level training centers
• Households who participate will receive a “starter kit”
• 4-6 tree seedlings
• Vegetable seeds or a voucher to obtain seeds and other inputs for the garden

5. Evaluation design
• The households are randomly chosen from a sample frame of PSNP beneficiary
households and cluster-randomized (at the kebele level) into three arms:
• T1 – Women only are invited, and provided with a standard training plus free
inputs
• T2 – Women and men from the same household invited, and provided with a
standard training and inputs, plus a joint planning exercise
• T3 – Control
• The joint planning exercise engages spouses in considering their workplan for
tree maintenance, composting and home gardening over the next 6–12 months,
devising the labor allocation, and summarizing their plan in a visual chart

6. Joint planning exercise
• Trainer walks the participants
through a list of the main SLM
activities
• Husband and wife take time to
discuss each activity and who will
have primary responsibility
• They use stickers to mark down
their decisions

7. Sample
• The study area includes 95 kebeles
• Selection of kebeles was made based on water availability and suitable
conditions for the given SLM practices
• The sample includes 1,900 households across 3 treatment arms
• The sample is restricted to:
• Households with PW requirement/working age members
• Households reporting a cohabiting couple
• Households reporting access to at least homestead land
• Households that are not included in the IMPEL or g-PM+ study samples

8. Timeline
May
2023
June
2023
July
2023
May
2024
Baseline
survey
Trainings Distribution of
seedlings
Endline
survey

9. Outcomes of interest
• Adoption of SLM practices
• Trees were planted
• Compost activities initiated
• Garden initiated
• Production outcomes
• Tree production: number of surviving trees, stem circumference
• Vegetable garden: quantity planted and harvested
• Knowledge around key technologies
• Intra-household decision-making and women’s empowerment
• Labor allocation within the household & women’s time use
• Decison-making within the household

10. Baseline survey
• May-June 2023
• Only female surveyed in each
household
• Core modules:
• Land characteristics
• Use of SLM practices
• Knowledge on SLM
• Household tasks
Time & risk preference
• Goal: measure if adoption differs based on
individual’s risk aversion or discount rates
• Choice games during the household survey
• All respondents receive a minimum of 50
birr for participation, and on average 50 birr
more
Spousal cooperation
• Goal: measure whether the intervention
shifts patterns of within household cooperation
• All households invited to a separate session
at a central location
• Two games: public goods and dictator game
• Minimum earnings of 100 birr, an average of
300 birr for the session (per individual)

11. Summary
• Limitations of the study design:
• Timeframe: as with most SLM interventions, benefits mostly expected to accrue in
long term
• Measurement of outcomes: have to rely on self-reports/simple observations
• Little is known about the status quo: how much are women currently involved in SLM
• But, the study can potentially contribute to multiple dimensions:
• So far, few large-scale SLM evaluations target women
• Little to no large scale evaluations compare including women only to including them
jointly with their spouses
• A rather extensive 3+-day participatory training
• Examination of the sustainability of a tree planting intervention (and its synergies with
the other two activities) is potentially of wide interest in Ethiopian context