# **Reconsidering the Evidence on the Returns to T&V Extension in Kenya**

# **Introduction**

The effectiveness of the public agricultural extension service in Kenya has been, and continues to be, a controversial issue. Two successive IDA-funded projects, the National Extension Projects I and II (NEP-I and II) have supported agricultural extension since 1982, at which time the World Bank introduced the Training and Visit (T&V) system of management. The objective of the projects was to make the Kenyan extension service more effective and efficient.

Towards the end of NEP-I in 1990, the Africa Technical Department of the World Bank undertook a study to evaluate the impact of the agricultural extension projects it had supported in Kenya and Burkina Faso. The Kenya study (Bindlish and Evenson, 1993) estimated the returns to extension at 350% (marginal internal rate of return), with a "lower bound" estimate of 160%. The returns to extension in Burkina Faso (Bindlish, Evenson and Gbetibouo, 1993) were estimated in a similar fashion at 91%. These studies and their findings received wide attention in the Bank and elsewhere.

At a time when many borrower countries were becoming disenchanted with the T&V approach because of its perceived high cost, as well as increasing concern within the Bank about "results on the ground" from the extension portfolio, the high estimated returns were greeted with skepticism in some quarters (World Bank, 1994, subsequently published in Purcell and Anderson, 1997). Nevertheless, sincp the estimates were arrived at by using household survey data, collected by an independent agency (the Central Bureau of Statistics) rather than the Ministry of Agriculture, and were based on formal statistical methods, the high estimated returns lent credibility to the claims made by the supporters of T&V. The findings vindicated the Bank's stated policy of using extension as a major plank in the overall rural development strategy for Africa (Cleaver, 1993). Hence, the Bank speeded up its already rapid pace of introducing the T&V system in Africa to the extent that, at the end of 1997, 22 countries had a national extension program using the T&V system of management, with active Bank projects supporting a total investment of over $700 million.

The present note is part of an impact evaluation study by the Operations Evaluation Department (OED) of the investment in agricultural extension in Kenya supported by the two World Bank projects, NEP-I and II. The purpose of this particular note is to test the robustness of the widely disseminated assessment of the economic returns to agricultural extension in Kenya estimated by Bindlish and Evenson (1993, revised in 1997). The matter is examined within the limits of the available cross-sectional data and the findings of this enquiry should, therefore, be considered as preliminary. The fuller OED study when complete will use panel data to overcome the limitations imposed by cross-sectional analysis and is expected to provide more robust results. Nevertheless, the findings in this paper do highlight the shortcomings of cross-sectional data to inform policy decisions.

Specifically, three issues that could potentially have an important bearing on the results of Bindlish and Evenson (hereafter B&E) are addressed. The first, related to the use of crosssectional data by B&E, is the sensitivity of their results to possible omitted factors, particularly region-specific effects due to natural productivity potential or other factors. The second is the