IFPRI’s HarvestPlus program is interested in studying the impact of a nutritious and climate smart biofortified maize variety on adoption, productivity, nutritional intake of farming households in Malawi. The commercialization of this variety by a private sector company offers critical market feasibility and policy lessons for improving the food and income security of smallholder farmers. Evaluating the impact of the introduction of the new variety calls for a randomization design in which villages are clustered into those that receive the variety (i.e., the treatment arms) and those that will not receive it (i.e., control arms). Additionally, we are testing a savings product in two treatment arms that use savings groups to help farmers “save up” for seed bags in collaboration with a local commercial bank. The study will also offer critical lessons on subgroups such as women and women headed households. The basic study design is included as Annex A.
This Request for Applications is the first of a two stage process of inviting survey companies to work with IFPRI on a randomized control trial to be implemented between 2025 and 2027. The survey will include a listing survey, baseline survey, and at least two follow up post-harvest rounds, and a small qualitative study. Survey companies are expected to provide a brief letter of interest, capability statement and specific and high-level budgets based on expected deliverables. Note however that this first round does not in any way make IFPRI liable for contracting the applicant. Only shortlisted candidates selected from this round will be further invited to submit full proposals. The deadline for this round is December 5th, 2024 while the next round will be announced later.
As described earlier, this study aims to implement a cluster randomized control trial with a focus on five districts in Malawi, namely Mulanje, Salima, Balaka, Mchinji, and Kasungu.
The study has three treatment and one control arm. 75% of approximately 3500 farmers will have at least one treatment plot (the biofortified variety) whereas the control plots will grow regular varieties. The primary target group for the treatment arms are farmer who are members of savings groups. The clustering method among others ensures to minimize potential contamination effects due to “variety sharing” or extension spillovers as entire clusters will be randomly assigned to either treatment or control groups.
In other words, clustering is taking place at the village level following the natural village boundaries. We expect 10 households will be randomly selected from each treatment and control cluster (approximately 245 clusters). Moreover, additional 4 farming households will be sampled per cluster to track local spillovers and account for attrition. Following a listing survey (to cover all eligible farmers at the cluster level) some farmers will be selected through a lottery to qualify for participation in the study. Different treatment arms come with different encouragements e.g discounts to study effects on uptake. Farmers will self-select into the lottery during the listing survey. A partner seed company will receive the list of winners and deliver the seed to treatment areas working in collaboration with their own distribution hubs and lead agrodealers.
In sum, four survey rounds including a baseline and two post-harvest rounds (tentative) and an initial listing survey will be carried out over the course of two agriculture seasons (visiting the same households). The listing survey will be collection of very basic household information and also collecting data on the local ecosystem for the treatment including savings groups, agrodealers and bank branches. The baseline questionnaire will collect detailed demographic, consumption, and agriculture information from households. The same household questionnaire will be used for both post-harvest rounds. The post-harvest questionnaires will add questions on the specific technology bundle experience. A qualitative survey at the beginning of the study of around 250 households (after listing) will elicit potential adoption of the variety at specified prices and also check the sentiment towards typical local varieties, their traits and approaches to saving and investment for farm inputs.
To reach the goals of the project, the following tasks will be addressed:
Task 1 - Preparatory
Task 2 - Team Training
Task 3 - Listing, Qualitative Survey and Baseline
Task 4 - Post harvest round 1
Task 5 - Post harvest round 2
Task 6 - Other - Marketing and Monitoring
Deliverable 1
Deliverable 2
Deliverable 3
Deliverable 4
Deliverable 5
Deliverable 6
Letter of interest (1 page max.) with approach to the study
Capability statement (2 pages max.) to support:
CVs of senior staff
Budget in template given below (USD); add rows/columns if needed
Expenditure Head
Description
Listing round Cost
Baseline Cost
PH1 Cost
PH2 Cost
Qual and Monitoring
Total
Rate
Unit (e.g persondays)
Senior Personnel
Enumerators
Training
Travel
SMS
Participant incentive
Any Other
Overhead
Grand Total
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