Reviews of the impact of extension services consistently conclude that female farmers are underserved: access to extension agents is significantly lower for women as compared to men. Ragasa (2014) reviews evidence from India and several countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and summarizes factors causing the gender gap in access to extension: extension agents primarily work with the main household decision maker, who is usually male; the perception that women’s contribution to farming in the household is minimal; household responsibilities and mobility constraints that hinder women’s participation in training activities; cultural factors that make interaction of female farmers with male extension agents difficult; and the like. As a result, women farmers receive mostly second-hand information from their husbands, and this information may not be attuned to their needs if their agricultural practices and crop choices are different from that of male farmers. In addition, women often lack the financial and material resources to translate theoretical knowledge into practice (O’Sullivan _et al,_ 2014; Ragasa, 2014; Quisumbing & Pandolfelli, 2010). Decomposition analyses from agricultural surveys in Ethiopia and Uganda show that when women farmers do receive extension services, they benefit from them less than their male counterparts (O’Sullivan _et al,_ 2014). More rigorous evidence is needed on specific interventions targeted at improving both access to and impact of extension for women farmers. A randomized control trial in Mozambique suggests that female farmers were more likely to learn about agricultural techniques in communities in which there was a second, female contact farmer, in addition to a male contact farmer (Kondylis _et al._ Mueller, 2014). Female messengers may not only improve communication to women, but also better meet their informational needs.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 provides a more detailed description of the RCBP. Section 3 outlines our identification strategy and provides a description of the data used to implement the estimation. The results are presented in Section 4 and Section 5 concludes.

# **2. Rural Capacity Building Project**

The Ethiopian extension system relies on a network of professionally trained extension workers, called Development Agents (DA), who are deployed in Farmer Training Centers (FTC). The objective of the Ethiopian government is to have one FTC in each kebele<sup>1</sup> in the country with three DAs per FTC, each specialized in a different topic: livestock, crops, or natural resources management. At the time of project preparation, at the end of 2006, only a small share of kebeles had a fully equipped and functional FTC and half of the DA target number had been reached.

The RCBP aimed at strengthening the agricultural extension service systems in Ethiopia to make them more responsive to the needs of farmers and enhance their capacity to become aware of, and adopt, economically viable and environmentally sustainable technologies and practices. Through these activities, the project hoped to raise households’ income, productivity and adoption of new agricultural practices by smallholder farmers. The RCBP was implemented in 10 regions, 127 woredas, 635 kebeles and 2,500 FTCs in the country, beginning in 2007. The project sought to improve the effectiveness of the agricultural extension program as it scaled up, particularly with regard to its DAs’ technical capacity and its ability to respond to the expressed needs of farmers

> 1 Ethiopia is divided in _woreda,_ or districts, which are composed of _kebeles._ A kebele is the smallest administrative division in Ethiopia, and is similar to a neighborhood, or a ward. There are about 8,000 kebeles in Ehiopia.

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