Abstract
The cropland productivity gap between Africa and the rest of the world is widening. Fortunately, increasing farmers’ access to useful agricultural information reduces the costs of searching for information, thereby leading to higher agricultural productivity and sustainability. This study investigates the association between the adoption of mobile phones to collect agricultural information and farmers’ technical efficiency (TE) in Zambia. Different from previous studies, we focus on the actual use of mobile phones by farmers rather than mere ownership. Farmers were selected using a two-stage sampling procedure, and the Cobb-Douglas (CD) production function is adopted to estimate the association using two approaches—the conventional stochastic production frontier (SPF) and propensity score matching-stochastic production frontier (PSM-SPF) model. In both cases, we found that the use of mobile phones is significantly and positively associated with farmers’ TE. However, the conventional SFP model exaggerates the TE scores by 5.3% due to its failure to mitigate biases from observed variables. Regarding the agricultural growth indicators (income and output) related to TE, a close inspection reveals that increasing mobile phone use to close the TE gap between the two groups could result in a 5.13% and 8.21% reduction in severity of poverty and extreme poverty, respectively. Additional research is essential to corroborate the findings and analyze the potential causal mechanisms. Our study provides strong evidence to promote mobile phone use in agricultural production in rural Zambia.
Highlights
Enhancing agricultural productivity in Africa is indispensable given revelations by the World Bank that the continent remains food-insecure amidst a burgeoning population [1,2]
We focus on the technical efficiency levels of the households which are derived from the estimation of the CD model using conventional stochastic production frontier (SPF) and propensity score matching-stochastic production frontier (PSM-SPF) model as explained in Section 2.3 The ultimate goal is to establish whether an association between mobile phone use and technical efficiency exists
We find that users have more years of formal education compared to their counterparts and rate the use of mobile phones as necessary unlike non-users, which is consistent with common sense and reality as the use of mobile phones demands higher levels of interest and technical abilities
Summary
Enhancing agricultural productivity in Africa is indispensable given revelations by the World Bank that the continent remains food-insecure amidst a burgeoning population [1,2]. Further evidence indicates that poverty, hunger, and malnutrition continue to be rampant [3], and climate change poses a high risk to the agriculture sector [4]. The bottom line is that Africa is still behind the rest of the world in terms of agricultural cropland productivity [5], despite already reported increased cropland productivity [6]. Most countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) have come up with ways of supporting poor farmers, with the aim of eradicating poverty and hunger. The promotion and provision of disease-resistant and high-yield seeds are among the strategies employed to increase agricultural output [7]. To the disappointment of many, these strategies have not made much difference, and the efficiency of farmers has been called into question
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