# **1. Introduction**

Agricultural extension services are designed to “extend” research-based knowledge to the rural sector to improve the lives of farmers, by increasing their yields and production (Davis, 2008). The services are based on the assumption that there are beneficial technologies that can improve farmers’ welfare, but that farmers need to know about them and about their benefits to adopt them. Extension services are meant to overcome this information barrier that constrains technology adoption, which may be rooted in low expected profits and perceived high risks (Jack, 2013). As information is a public good, its provision is associated with market failures, which justify government intervention in the provision of the services (Maffioli _et al_ , 2011; Anderson and Feder, 2007). Indeed, most countries of Sub-Saharan Africa have been providing various forms of extension services for the last four decades through public investment. However, there is a lack of rigorous evidence on the impact of these investments on their ultimate beneficiaries, farming households.

Weaknesses in public extension systems have been noted but the evidence remains insufficient to reach a conclusion on the viability of extension services, based on cost-benefit considerations (Rivera et al, 2001, Anderson and Feder; 2007). Rigorous evidence on the impact of extension service investments could potentially have important effects on policy maker’s commitment to adequately support such endeavors. Evidence would help promote policies geared towards the types of services that are most efficient in reaching beneficiaries and increasing productivity and income. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of the Rural Capacity Building Project (RCBP), a public investment to strengthen the extension system in Ethiopia.

Agriculture accounts for 85 percent of employment and 46 percent of GDP in Ethiopia (World Bank & IFPRI, 2010) and is dominated by smallholder farming, which accounts for approximately 96 percent of the country’s cultivated area (Taffesse et al, 2012). Although there has been growth in production since 2000, most of the growth has come from increases in the area cultivated rather than an intensification of production. Yields have thus remained low by international standards (Taffesse et al, 2012). In 2006, as part of an array of policies that focused on promoting agricultural growth, the government implemented the RCBP, with the objective of strengthening agricultural services and systems and making them more responsive to the needs of smallholder farmers.

One of the components of the RCBP focused on improving the effectiveness of agricultural extension services in the country and explicitly sought to increase female participation by mainstreaming gender in all aspects of the extension system. Participation of women in agriculture in Ethiopia is substantial, with estimates lying between 29 percent and 45.5 percent of agricultural labor, according to the source (FAO, 2011; Palacios-Lopez _et al,_ 2017). The gender gap in access to extension services appears relatively low in a study using data collected in 2009 in four regions of Ethiopia (World Bank/IFPRI, 2010). Twenty percent of women report having been visited by an extension agent, against 27 percent of men. However, they may simply be reporting the fact that an agent visited the home, even if they did not directly address the female respondent. The gender gap becomes significant in access to technical advice through community meetings organized by extension officers. Only 11 percent of women used this service against 28 percent of men (World Bank/IFPRI, 2010). In the sample used in the present study, 68 percent of femaleheaded households reported having had any contact with an extension officer in the past 12 months.

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