Projects

This is a three-year research program running from January 2025 to December 2027, investigating the reach, adoption, and impact of agricultural innovations promoted by the CGIAR (the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research)—a global partnership advancing research that supports food security and the sustainable transformation of food, land, and water systems—and introduced in Nigeria over the past two decades (2005–2025).

The program's key deliverables include: a major stocktaking report documenting CGIAR-promoted innovations disseminated across Nigeria; a nationally representative agricultural household dataset capturing the reach and uptake of innovations distributed at scale, complemented by a series of randomized controlled trials testing key questions on technology adoption and diffusion; and a comprehensive analytical report documenting and accompanying the dataset.

The program is structured in phases and draws on an expanding, interdisciplinary team. Year 1 is led primarily by economists—including agricultural and environmental economists—based across multiple countries. Years 2 and 3 substantially broaden the program's disciplinary scope by engaging crop scientists, plant biologists, and bioinformatics experts, who play leading roles in sample design and in collecting DNA fingerprinting and remote sensing data linked to CGIAR-promoted innovations.

Funding: USD 2 million
Funder: The Gates Foundation through the Standing Panel on Impact Assessment – SPIA
Principal Investigator: Yonas Alem, School of Economics, University of Cape Town
Causal Methods: Randomized Controlled Trials & Quasi Experimental Methods
Publications:

The Soil Health Innovation Package and Learning Agenda project designs and tests an evidence-based Innovation Package for scaling soil health innovations that improve agricultural productivity sustainably and strengthen farmer livelihoods. The project first assesses the behavioral, institutional, and market barriers preventing smallholder farmers from adopting soil health innovations, then identifies priority investment categories and scalable innovations within each. Drawing on this evidence, it develops an Innovation Package that combines technical, institutional, and financial elements to support adoption among millions of farmers, particularly small-scale producers. The project further supports country-level and regional engagement with governments, multilateral development banks, and technical partners to implement the Package across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and builds a learning agenda to draw lessons for scaling AIM for Scale innovations—including soil health interventions—more broadly.

Funding: USD 450,000
Funder: International Affairs Office, Presidential Court, United Arab Emirates
Principal Investigator: Yonas Alem, School of Economics, University of Cape Town
Causal Method: Randomized Controlled Trials and Synthesis of Existing RCTs
Publications:

Why do profitable, socially beneficial technologies remain underadopted among firms in developing countries? This project studies this question through a randomized controlled trial with urban restaurants, a major consumer of biomass fuels. The experiment tested whether tailored, picture‑based information on environmental harms and private cost savings increaseswillingness to pay (WTP) for solar water heaters (SWHs) that replace charcoal‑fired boilers, eliciting WTP under upfront payment and under credit with monthly, weekly, and daily repayment schedules. It also investigates the actual uptake of SWHs by enterprises in urban Tanzania.

Funding: USD 94,000
Funder: Private Enterprise Development in Low and Middle Income Countries (PEDL), and the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC)
Principal Investigator: Yonas Alem, School of Economics, University of Cape Town
Causal Method: Randomized Controlled Trials 
Publications:

Unreliable grid electricity forces micro-enterprises in developing countries to substitute toward fossil fuel--powered generators, imposing large private costs and unpriced pollution externalities. Exploiting a sharp spatial regression discontinuity created by a distribution infrastructure upgrade in Lagos, Nigeria, this project provides causal evidence that improved grid reliability reduces generator ownership by 18.3 percentage points, daily fuel consumption by 33.4%, and CO2 emissions by 630~kg per firm per year. A cost--benefit analysis shows that replacing generators with solar PV systems yields a benefit--cost ratio of 13:1 at a 3% social discount rate. Despite these large returns, willingness to pay for solar PV is negligible. We rule out information gaps and liquidity constraints as primary explanations and provide evidence consistent with present-biased preferences and inattention to future fuel savings as the binding barriers to clean energy adopti

Funding: USD 40,000 
Funder: J-PAL – King Climate Action, & Environment for Development (EfD)
Principal Investigator: Yonas Alem, School of Economics, University of Cape Town
Causal Method: Regression Discontinuity Design
Publications