The evaluation of an intermediate impact on organizational performance allows to explain a program’s success or failure, which can be more important than identifying ultimate outcomes at the farm-household level (as in this case).

1. Promoting the role of farmer-based organizations
for value chain integration in Ghana:
an impact evaluation based on organizational diagnostics
Nicola Francesconi, CIAT
Fleur Wouterse, IFPRI

2. Did you know?
• the UN declared 2012 as the International Year of Cooperatives
• cooperatives play a major role in rural financial and extension services worldwide
• 50% of global agricultural output is marketed through cooperatives
• cooperatives were instrumental for the success of family farms in the US and EU
Coops prevalence
in Africa
% of rural villages
with at least one coop
Senegal 47
Burkina Faso 56
Ethiopia 35
Uganda 31
Recent data from CIAT shows that 80%
of Ugandan bean producers are
members of at least one farmer
organization based on cooperative
values and principles

3. What is a cooperative?
Not an NGO or a parastatal because it is a for profit organization
Not an Investor-Owned Firm (IOF) because it is:
an organization owned and controlled by the individuals benefiting
from its services
or
a user-owned, user-controlled and user-benefitted organization

4. The History of Rural Cooperation in Ghana
(from defensive to offensive)
Time
Market-driven
State-driven
Community-driven Mutuals
Coops
FBOs
Pre-colonial Colonial &
Post Independence
Post Structural
Adjustment
Governance
In 2010:
10,000 FBOs
and growing rapidly…
but informal, at an infant stage
and still uncompetitive

5. How to support the development of FBOs in order to boost
agri-commercialization among Ghanaian farmers?
The MiDA program
• Initial population: 3,052 voluntarily enlisted and surveyed FBOs from target horticulture/maize areas
• Selection criteria: approx. 50 members, women’s equal participation, community-based, recently
established (or re-established), strong leadership
• Intervention: collateral to facilitate FBOs’ access to credit for collective investments to improve
farmers’ vertical integration into value chains (warehouses, vehicles, processing plants, etc.)
• Incentives for participation: starter packs to member farmers (fertilizer, seeds, equipment, cash, etc.)
• Selection outcome: 1,242 FBOs were selected into the program

6. MiDA’s failure:
• Only 269 loans disbursed, for 1,242 participants!!!
• Many FBOs did not apply for a loan
• Many other FBOs were not successful in their application due to the poor
quality of their business plans
• Due to this shortfall the MiDA program was widely considered to have failed
in improving farmers’ commercialization.
To what extent did the program fail (negligible or negative impact)?
And what are the reasons for this failure?

7. Theory of Change
MiDA
Program
Intervention
Negative impact on
organizational
performance
Negative impact
on farmers’
commercialization
No impact on
organizational
performance
The incentives and selection criteria
introduced by the program had either a
negligible or negative intermediate impact
on FBOs’ performance in mobilizing
collective investments, and therefore the
ultimate impact on farmers’
commercialization is also expected to be
either negative or insignificant.
No impact on
farmers’
commercialization
How to test this
theory of change?

8. Impact Evaluation based on Organizational Diagnostics
• The programs’ ultimate impact can be defined and explained on the basis of its
intermediate impact on organizational performance.
• But impact evaluations are usually designed to identify ultimate impacts at the
farm household level, providing little insights about organizational reasons for
success or failure (they identify unique and static impacts for a given place and
point in time)
• Ultimate impacts are also indirectly related to a program and thus their
identification and attribution tends to be uncertain and partial.
• Measuring intermediate impacts on organizational performance has the
potential to identify more directly attributable, holistic and longer term,
behavioral impacts.
• Therefore we adapted impact evaluation techniques to evaluate intermediate
impacts on organizational performance.

9. Data collection
• Survey data on 500 FBOs collected by 17 MSc students using
questionnaires uploaded into smartphones.
• The sample was randomly drawn from the original MiDA list of 3,052
FBOs: all surveyed FBOs wanted to participate (< self-selection bias)!!
• Semi-structured interviews and games with three board members per
FBO to capture: collective investments, participation in the program,
proxies for selection criteria and fixed effects.

10. Data descriptives
500 observations, fixed effects excluded

11. Risk-game (with three leaders per FBO)
Sequence of the game
• the three board members were separated (no hear, no see)
• they were explained the rules of the game through a demo
• they were asked to pick a risk option from 0 to 7 (Binswanger 1980)
• they were gathered in a central place and a coin was tossed
• players’ individual payoffs were calculated and handed out
• Leadership strength was measured by the average standard deviation
(from the median) of the risk options picked by the three players, i.e.
by the level of homogeneity in leaders’ risk preferences

12. Binswanger’s risk game

13. IV regression: first stage
R-squared 0.18, 500 obs., Kleibergen-Paap and Hansen J tests

14. IV regression: second stage
R-squared 0.10, 500 obs., consistent with OLS

15. Conclusions
• Likely negative impact on farmers’ commercialization because the:
I. program incentives may have induced shirking among member-farmers
(avoidance to invest in the common cause)
II. program selection strategy failed to promote participation by
older (more consolidated) FBOs with stronger leadership, which
are more likely to develop feasible investment plans
• The evaluation of an intermediate impact on organizational performance
allows to explain a program’s success or failure, which can be more
important than identifying ultimate outcomes at the farm-household level
(as in this case).