This article examines the magnitude and sources of yield variation among adopters of improved cowpea varieties in northern Nigeria promoted through farmer-to-farmer diffusion. The results reveal important efficiency differences between the lead farmers who have contacts with breeders and the...

This article assembles the results of three multicountry surveys on variety performance and adoption patterns to measure the impacts of maize research in West and Central Africa from 1981 to 2005, and uses cost data since 1971 to compute social rates of return on public investments in maize...

On the basis of projected economic and poverty impacts of alternative commodity research programs, this article assessed efficiency and equity tradeoffs and the scope for research resource reallocation in Nigeria. Given the importance of major food staples to both poor and nonpoor households in...

Crop-livestock integration (CLI) to improve natural resource management for increased productivity is evolving in Nigeria and West Africa. Processes in the evolution and factors that influence it still need to be well understood. This article proposes and tests a new framework for measuring the...

This study links participatory research methods, geographic information systems (GIS) techniques, village and household-level surveys, and a tobit analysis to examine the adoption and impact issues related to a new technology, improved varieties of dual-purpose cowpea (IDPC), developed by...

This paper measures the technical, allocative, and economic efficiencies of farmers within and outside the Extension Package Program (EPP) in high and low potential agro-ecological zones in eastern Ethiopia. Within-group farmer efficiencies are analyzed relative to respective technologies to...

This article measures and compares total factor productivity growth in African agriculture under contemporaneous and sequential technology frontiers over the period 1970-2004. The sources of productivity growth are examined using a fixed-effects regression model and a polynomial distributed lag...