In collaboration with the CGIAR Initiative on Gender Equality (HER+), World Vision implements co-designed sustainable land management interventions within Ethiopia’s social protection programming, reaching women in poor rural households.
Sustainable land management (SLM) practices are critical to climate resilience in rural Ethiopia. HER+ collaborated with World Vision International (WVI) on formative research to co-design interventions promoting adoption of SLM practices. WVI implemented these interventions for 1,240 poor rural households receiving Ethiopia’s social protection programming, providing a bundle of inputs and training to either women only or jointly to women and men. Evidence shows the interventions have increased adoption of SLM practices.
Interventions to increase adoption of SLM
SLM practices, such as composting, agroforestry and intercropping, enhance resilience to climatic and environmental shocks. In Ethiopia, policy interest in enhancing SLM is high but uptake remains low, particularly among women, despite the proven benefits in terms of household income and land productivity. The long-term goals of adoption of SLM include the enhancement of soil fertility, the reduction of erosion and increasing women’s resilience to climate and environmental shocks.
In 2022, researchers from HER+ partnered with WVI to conduct formative research on benefits of SLM practices and barriers to women’s participation, as well as a baseline survey, in order to co-design an intervention aimed at promoting adoption of SLM practices among women. The formative research showed that SLM practices have a range of benefits (and in particular, tree planting can generate income in the medium term), but key barriers to women’s involvement include lack of access to inputs such as seedlings and labour constraints for tasks like compost making. The baseline survey further revealed participation in SLM practices skewed toward men, in part because access to information was often channelled through male-dominated public works.
Based on the formative study findings, HER+ researchers and WVI co-designed an intervention that was rolled out in early 2023 that provided training and a package of inputs to poor rural households. The intervention was delivered as a component of the Strengthen PSNP Institutions and Resilience Phase II (SPIR II) Programme, implemented by WVI, CARE International, and ORDA Ethiopia. SPIR II works with participants of Ethiopia’s flagship public works programme, the Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP), which provides food and cash transfers in the form of payments for seasonal labour on public works or as direct support to the poorest 10% of households. The SLM intervention was designed to build upon the PSNP by providing training and free inputs (tree seedlings, vegetable seeds and tools for home gardening). The training curriculum included information on land management, compost preparation and application, beds and pit preparation, aiming to enhance soil health. Training was provided either to women only or jointly to men and women in the same household. Joint training was intended to encourage collaborative efforts between spouses in their uptake of the SLM practices.
The SPIR II implementing partners successfully provided the SLM training and inputs to 1,240 poor rural households within SPIR II. Among these households, 660 were randomly selected for only women to be trained, while in the 580 remaining households, couples were trained together. The implementers documented positive responses from programme beneficiaries, including reports of increased vegetable production, income diversification, joint engagement in production, and improved family health. HER+ researchers collected survey data to estimate the impacts on adoption of SLM practices from the provision of inputs and training. Preliminary analyses indicated that, one year post-training, the interventions had small positive effects on knowledge of SLM practices, but a large positive effect on adoption of SLM practices. Effects on SLM adoption were similar across treatment groups, regardless of whether training was provided to women only or to couples. The SLM intervention led to small improvements in intra-household decision-making patterns, and this improvement was slightly larger when the intervention targeted couples rather than only women.
HER+ researchers disseminated these findings in a workshop in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in December 2024. Workshop participants expressed that the study findings were useful for their understanding and would inform their thinking on future programming.
The SLM intervention (…) got both the SPIR technical teams and participants excited because of its multidimensional and integrated nature – with NRM technical components, soil fertility enhancements for improved production (compost), improved nutrition through vegetable gardening (…), and a gender component bringing attention to different expected roles and discussion and facilitation of joint planning with couples attending the training together in one of the treatment arms (…) SPIR expects to build on the positive results from this study by incorporating this integrated approach into its SLM-focused programming.
Michael Mulford, Chief of Party, SPIR II, World Vision International.