Rubber is particularly important, as Côte d’Ivoire is Africa’s top rubber exporter, though productivity is dampened by the old age of current plantations and the use of non-improved seedling varieties.

Gender is a fundamental determinant of an individual’s opportunities and constraints in the country. Research has found that household allocation of crop income is gender-specific in Côte d’Ivoire (Duflo and Udry 2003) and that income from cash crops is usually controlled by men (Maertens and Swinnen 2010); occupational segregation is a key driver of gender gaps in the country (Donald, Lawin and Rouanet 2020). Rubber is no exception, with women making up only a small share of rubber producers nationally. Working together with the Ivorian rubber professional association APROMAC, we innovated on their standard agricultural extension training to address the twin problems of low agricultural productivity and low participation of women in rubber production.

The training was developed in the context of an intervention delivering improved planting material to eligible farmers through the Côte d’Ivoire Agricultural Support Program (PSAC), financed by the World Bank, which mandated the 3-day agricultural training before receiving inputs from the program. The setting for this study spans four regions in the south (Gboklé, Grand Ponts, La Mé and Sud-Comoé) and four regions in the center of Côte d’Ivoire (Haut-Sassandra, Iffou, Moronou and N’Zi). To be eligible, farmers needed to have less than two hectares of rubber cultivated pre-program and be willing to increase cultivation.

# **2.1 Experimental Design and Implementation**

Our sampling frame is the APROMAC database of farmers who applied to receive high-yield variety rubber seedlings from the program. While a small number of female producers also applied to receive rubber seedlings, here we focus on the male producers only.<sup>2</sup> We randomly assigned these male farmers to two variants of the agricultural extension training. The randomization was done at the village-level to ease training implementation and minimize non-compliance with treatment status. Once a village had been randomly labelled as an individual training (T1) or couples’ training (T2) village, we randomly selected a fixed number of male lead farmer applicants to receive that village’s training (T1 or T2) or be in the control group.<sup>3</sup> APROMAC extension agents were given the list of farmers who reported a given village on their application form, along with the treatment status for each village (and consequently for each farmer). They then contacted the farmers around a week prior to the training to invite them, using the phone number provided on the application form.

Figure 1 shows the experimental design. Of the 2,502 male lead farmers in a couple who applied, 30 percent were randomized into receiving the training by themselves, while another 30 percent were randomized into receiving the training with their spouse.

> 2 Our original sampling frame included a small share of female lead farmers: 307 women, or 17.6% of the sample. Treatment assignment is unbalanced (and underpowered) within the female lead farmer group, precluding a standalone analysis.

> 3 We generated quartiles of the number of applicants, and the number of applicants randomized into treatment was a discontinuous function of this number, based on an agreement with APROMAC given the available supply of seedlings. For example, the number of beneficiaries was 2 in the first quartile if the number of new beneficiaries was below 10, and 8 otherwise. The number of beneficiaries was 13 in the second quartile, 25 in the third quartile and 50 in the fourth quartile.

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