Social incentives as nudges for agricultural knowledge diffusion and willingness to pay for certified seeds: Experimental evidence from Uganda.

A transition from low-input subsistence farming in Sub-Saharan Africa will require the use of yield-increasing agricultural technologies. However, in developing countries, most farmers continue to rely heavily on pest-infested and disease-infected recycled seed from own or local sources leading to low yields. This study used a field experiment to examine the effect of a social incentive combined with goal setting on the diffusion of agricultural knowledge and uptake of quality certified seed by farmers. We relaxed the seed access and information/knowledge constraints by introducing improved varieties of sweetpotato in the study villages and providing training to carefully selected progressive farmers who were then linked to co-villagers. We find that social incentives combined with goal setting reduced the likelihood of the trained progressive farmers reaching out to co-villagers to share information and discuss farming. Further, social incentive combined with goal setting had no significant effect on knowledge and experimentation by progressive farmers, and on willingness to pay for improved seed - as elicited through auctions, our proxy for experimentation, by co-villagers. These findings suggest that the combination of goal setting and public recognition acted to crowd-out diffusion effort. We conclude that social incentive combined with goal setting by established progressive farmers already enjoying a certain degree of public recognition is not sufficient to induce effort in learning and experimentation with agricultural innovations. These results have implications for design of policy and extension services to promote adoption of agricultural technologies with proven food and nutrition security benefits in developing countries.

Decision tree scoring system to guide selection for consumer preference in sweetpotato breeding trials.

BACKGROUND: Previously, a lexicon and protocol for quantitative descriptive analysis (QDA) was established for the Uganda sweetpotato breeding program. The implication of QDA scores for priority sensory attributes on consumer preference should be determined to interpret results efficiently and make decisions effectively. The present study aimed to develop a gender-responsive decision tree to obtain an overall sweetpotato eating quality score to facilitate demand-led targeted breeding selection. It focused on Kamuli and Hoima districts (Uganda) and uses pre-lease advanced clones ('NKB3', 'NKB105', 'NKB135', 'D11' and 'D20'), released varieties ('NASPOT 8' and 'NAROSPOT 1') and landraces ('Muwulu-Aduduma', 'Umbrella'). RESULTS: Including boiled sweetpotato sensory characteristics, namely mealy, sweet taste, sweetpotato smell, firm and not fibrous, in breeding design would benefit end-users, especially women given their role in varietal selection, food preparation and marketing. 'D20', 'NASPOT 8' and 'NAROSPOT 1' were most liked in both districts. 'NKB3' and 'D11' were the least liked in Hoima, whereas 'Muwulu-Aduduma' was the least liked in Kamuli. There was a positive correlation between color and overall liking (r2 = 0.8) and consumers liked the color (average rating ≥ 6 on a nine-point hedonic scale) of all genotypes. Threshold values (average rating on 11-point scales) for consumer acceptability were identified (sweet taste = 6, sweetpotato aroma and flavor = 6, firmness = 3, and mealiness = 4). A regression decision tree tool was created to calculate an eating quality selection index when screening lines in breeding programs using the values. CONCLUSION: Decision trees that include consumer needs and gender considerations would facilitate demand-led breeding and make varietal selection in sweetpotato breeding programs more effective. © 2023 The Authors. Journal of The Science of Food and Agriculture published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society of Chemical Industry.

Assessment of consumers' preference for orange-fleshed sweet potato puree chapati: a case of rural and urban consumers in Kenya.

BACKGROUND: Orange-fleshed sweet potato (OFSP) is bio-fortified with vitamin A precursors through breeding and is thus ideal for combating vitamin A deficiency (VAD). One of the potential mechanisms to promote the consumption of OFSP is to enhance its availability through processing into products with a longer shelf life and more desirable to consumers. However, very few farmers and agro-processors practice value addition due to market uncertainties; there is little information on market availability for OFSP products. This study examined consumers' preference for OFSP puree chapati in rural and urban areas of Kenya, using the contingent valuation method. Data was collected from a random sample of 411 sweet potato consumers and a double-bounded logit model was applied to analyze consumers' willingness to pay (WTP) for OFSP puree chapati. RESULTS: Consumers were willing to pay a price of Kenya shillings (KES) 19 (USD 0.14) and 35 (USD 0.26) for OFSP puree chapati in Homa Bay and Nairobi counties, respectively. The presence of children under 5 years in a household, consumers' awareness of OFSP products and benefits of consuming OFSP, and level of education had a positive and significant influence on WTP for OFSP puree chapati in both regions. CONCLUSION: The study demonstrated that consumers exhibited a positive preference for OFSP puree chapati. In order to increase the consumption of OFSP and its value-added products, it is important to promote consumer awareness of OFSP puree chapati and other such nutritious products through cooking demonstrations and other nudging approaches using attractive illustrations and social media platforms that engage mothers and care-givers of children under 5 years old as well as the youth. © 2023 The Authors. Journal of The Science of Food and Agriculture published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society of Chemical Industry.

Targeting market segment needs with public-good crop breeding investments: A case study with potato and sweetpotato focused on poverty alleviation, nutrition and gender.

Crop breeding programs have often focused on the release of new varieties that target yield improvement to achieve food security and reduce poverty. While continued investments in this objective are justified, there is a need for breeding programs to be increasingly more demand-driven and responsive to the changing customer preferences and population dynamics. This paper analyses the responsiveness of global potato and sweetpotato breeding programs pursued by the International Potato Center (CIP) and its partners to three major development indicators: poverty, malnutrition and gender. The study followed a seed product market segmentation blueprint developed by the Excellence in Breeding platform (EiB) to identify, describe, and estimate the sizes of the market segments at subregional levels. We then estimated the potential poverty and nutrition impacts of investments in the respective market segments. Further, we employed the G+ tools involving multidisciplinary workshops to evaluate the gender-responsiveness of the breeding programs. Our analysis reveals that future investments in breeding programs will achieve greater impacts by developing varieties for market segments and pipelines that have more poor rural people, high stunting rates among children, anemia prevalence among women of reproductive age, and where there is high vitamin A deficiency. In addition, breeding strategies that reduce gender inequality and enhance appropriate change of gender roles (hence gender transformative) are also required.

Gender mainstreaming in sweetpotato breeding in Uganda: a case study.

Purpose: In Uganda, sweetpotato [Ipomoea batatas (L.) Lam] is typically a "woman's crop," grown, processed, stored and also mainly consumed by smallholder farmers for food and income. Farmers value sweetpotato for its early maturity, resilience to stresses, and minimal input requirements. However, productivity remains low despite the effort of breeding programs to introduce new varieties. Low uptake of new varieties is partly attributed to previous focus by breeders on agronomic traits and much less on quality traits and the diverse preferences of men and women in sweetpotato value chains. Method: To address this gap, breeders, food scientists, and social scientists (including gender specialists) systematically mainstreamed gender into the breeding program. This multidisciplinary approach, grounded in examining gender roles and their relationship with varietal and trait preferences, integrated important traits into product profiles. Results: Building on earlier efforts of participatory plant breeding and participatory varietal selection, new interventions showed subtle but important gender differences in preferences. For instance, in a study for the RTBFoods project, women prioritized mealiness, sweetness, firmness and non-fibrous boiled roots. These were further subjected to a rigorous gender analysis using the G+ product profile query tool. The breeding pipelines then incorporated these gender-responsive priority quality traits, prompting the development of standard operating procedures to phenotype these traits. Conclusion: Following an all-inclusive approach coupled with training of multidisciplinary teams involving food scientists, breeders, biochemists, gender specialists and social scientists, integration into participatory variety selection in Uganda enabled accentuation of women and men's trait preferences, contributing to clearer breeding targets. The research has positioned sweetpotato breeding to better respond to the varying needs and preferences of the users.

Using preschoolers to improve caregivers' knowledge, attitude, and practices relating to biofortified crops: Evidence from a randomized nutrition education trial in Kenya.

This 2018 randomized controlled trial examined the role behavioral nudges can play in improving caregivers' knowledge, attitude, and practices (KAP) relating to biofortified orange-fleshed sweetpotato (OFSP). The experiment involved 431 preschooler-caregiver pairs in 15 villages. The preschoolers were enrolled in public-run Early Childhood Development and Education (ECDE) centers in the respective villages. Caregivers were first exposed to the routine OFSP promotion activities in the area - invited to cooking demonstration workshops and issued with free OFSP vines to plant. A baseline survey followed. Next, the 15 villages were randomized into four study groups (a control and three treatments). The interventions were deployed for 30 days as follows: Treatment 1 - preschoolers issued OFSP-branded exercise books, class posters, and poems; Treatment 2 - caregivers received phone-mediated text messages; and Treatment 3 - received the full suite of interventions. This study analyzed the endline and baseline data and finds that, in general, changes in KAP scores were negatively associated with control group (p = .005) and positively associated with Treatment 3 (p = .02). Specifically, Treatment 3 significantly increased caregivers' knowledge of OFSP production, consumption, and vitamin A. Treatment 2 significantly improved their attitude too. It concludes that an integrated complementary nutrition education approach targeting preschooler-caregiver pairs is more effective in increasing knowledge of cultivation and consumption of OFSP. It discusses the implications for the design of more effective nutrition programs targeting households with preschoolers to accelerate the fight against vitamin A deficiency (VAD).

Market Intelligence and Incentive-Based Trait Ranking for Plant Breeding: A Sweetpotato Pilot in Uganda.

Crop breeding programs must accelerate crop improvement, spur widespread adoption of new varieties and increase variety turnover they are to meet the diverse needs of their clients. More comprehensive quantitative approaches are needed to better inform breeding programs about the preferred traits among farmers and other actors. However, the ability of current breeding programs to meet the demands of their clients is limited by the lack of insights about value chain actor preference for individual or packages of traits. Ranking traits based on monetary incentives, rather than subjective values, represents a more comprehensive, consistent, and quantitative approach to inform breeding programs. We conducted a large pilot in Uganda to assess the implementation of a novel approach to trait ranking, using a uniquely large sample of diverse sweetpotato value chain actors. We found meaningful differences in trait ranking and heterogeneity among different actors using this approach. We also show our approach's effectiveness at uncovering unmet demand for root quality traits and at characterizing the substantial trait demand heterogeneity among value chain players. Implementing this approach more broadly for sweetpotato and other crops would increase the effectiveness of breeding programs to improve food security in developing countries.

Do Behavioral Interventions Increase the Intake of Biofortified Foods in School Lunch Meals? Evidence from a Field Experiment with Elementary School Children in Ethiopia.

BACKGROUND: Many African countries are seeking to improve nutrition by introducing biofortified foods in school feeding programs. These programs are generally designed to create demand for biofortified foods both in and outside of school. Finding ways to encourage child acceptance of novel biofortified foods is key to the success of this strategy. OBJECTIVES: The aim was to assess effects of 2 behavioral interventions in promoting the consumption of biofortified foods as part of school lunch meals. METHODS: The study is based on a field experiment involving 360 school-going children of in the third, fourth, and sixth grades. We tested if structured provision of information about the nutritional benefits of a biofortified food and its association with an aspirational figure influence its consumption when served alongside a favorite local food as part of school lunch meal. Six schools in Tigray, Ethiopia, were randomly selected to participate, with 4 participating in the Orange-Fleshed Sweetpotato (OFSP) Program. Of the 4 participating in the program, 2 were assigned to provide educational information about sweetpotato, whereas 2 presented the same information plus depictions of an aspirational figure (a famous local athlete) associated with the sweetpotato. RESULTS: Provision of information on the nutritional benefits of biofortified food combined with an aspirational figure resulted in increased consumption of biofortified food by children. However, provision of the information alone did not detectably increase consumption. An analysis of trends over the course of the study revealed no discernable decay effect. CONCLUSIONS: Our results highlight the potential for relatively inexpensive behavioral interventions to increase acceptance of novel biofortified foods among children in a developing-country context. Larger studies with more varied interventions and larger numbers of participating schools could address several of the weaknesses in this study and establish more robust findings.

The Role of Targeted Nutrition Education of Preschoolers and Caregivers on Sustained Consumption of Biofortified Orange-Fleshed Sweetpotato in Kenya.

BACKGROUND: Persistent prevalence of high malnutrition in poor households in developing countries calls for enhancement of cost-effective nutrition interventions among the vulnerable groups. One responsive way is to promote regular consumption of home-grown biofortified foods, particularly in the micronutrient-deficient groups. Previous nutrition interventions have targeted adults with behavior change education, but have rarely explored the potential of nutrition education of preschoolers as change agents. OBJECTIVES: This study sought to assess the effect of nutrition education targeting preschool children and their caregivers on their consumption of vitamin A-biofortified orange-fleshed sweetpotato (OFSP) in rural farm households in Homa Bay County, Kenya. METHODS: A total of 431 preschooler-caregiver pairs from 15 village-level clusters were recruited into a randomized controlled trial. The sample was randomized into 1 control (3 villages) and 3 treatment groups (4 villages each). Treatments involved channeling nutrition education to preschoolers through their learning materials (preschooler treatment); the caregivers through their mobile phones (caregiver treatment); and to both preschoolers and their caregivers simultaneously (integrated treatment). Baseline and follow-up household-level surveys were conducted with the caregivers, and consumption data were collected from the preschoolers using a child dietary diversity register. Class teachers sought 24-h consumption recalls of the preschoolers for 19 consecutive schooldays. RESULTS: The results of a zero-inflated Poisson regression showed that the phone-mediated and multichanneled nutrition education approaches significantly increased the number of days of OFSP consumption. The integrated nutrition education approach significantly increased the preschoolers' likelihood to consume OFSP, number of OFSP consumption days, and likelihood to consume it more than once per week by 11%, 77%, and 20%, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: Nutrition education through OFSP-branded preschoolers' learning materials and phone-mediated messages provides effective nudges to the caregivers to feed their preschoolers regularly with OFSP. This could have implications for realizing sustainable nutrition programs in biofortified crop-growing areas.

Do Nutrition Education Approaches With Preschoolers and Their Caregivers Influence Retention of Biofortified Orange-Fleshed Sweet Potato on Farms? Evidence From Homa Bay County, Kenya.

BACKGROUND: Biofortified staples have been promoted widely in sub-Saharan Africa to combat micronutrient deficiencies. Contemporary projects are increasingly using elementary schools to target households with these foods. OBJECTIVE: This study assessed the effects of integrated nutrition education approaches, targeting preschoolers and their caregivers, on retention of orange-fleshed sweet potato (OFSP) on farms in the second season after lapse of free vine dissemination initiatives. METHODS: Rural farming households, with preschoolers and no prior engagement with OFSP, were targeted. A multistage sample of 431 preschooler-caregiver pairs was recruited for a cluster-randomized controlled trial. After issuing routine OFSP promotion activities, 15 village-level clusters of the pairs were randomized into 1 control group (3 villages) and 3 treatment arms (4 villages each) for the interventions. Baseline and follow-up household-level survey data were collected from the caregivers. The interventions included: (1) OFSP-branded exercise books, posters, and a poem to preschoolers only; (2) OFSP-oriented mobile phone mediated text messages to caregivers only; and (3) both 1 and 2 provided to individual households concurrently. Interventions 1 and 2 were single-channeled, while 3 was multichanneled. We estimated the intention-to-treat (ITT) and treatment-on-the-treated (TOT) effects using a binary logit model and a special regressor method, respectively. RESULTS: Only the multi-channeled nutrition education approach had significant effects (ITT = 0.167, P = .001; TOT = .243, P = .007) on the caregivers' likelihood to retain OFSP on their farms. CONCLUSIONS: The finding implies that multi-channeled agriculture nutrition education interventions through Early Childhood Development institutions can be effective in ensuring sustainable adoption of OFSP.

Quality and psychosocial factors influencing purchase of orange-fleshed sweetpotato bread.

This 2018 study, conducted in six Tusky's supermarkets in Nairobi, Kenya, combined the Just-About-Right, Penalty and Mean-End-Chain analyses to examine the quality and psychosocial factors influencing the purchase of a novel bread made from orange-fleshed sweet potato (OFSP), a biofortified crop, focusing on sixty-one male and eighty female urban OFSP bread buyers recruited at point of purchase. It finds that sensory and psychosocial factors drive purchasing decisions and that some of the bread's sensory characteristics are misaligned with consumers' expectations. It also finds that women and men's evaluations of the bread's characteristics are different, as are their motivations for purchase. However, good sensory attributes and the knowledge of the bread's nutritional value were key drivers. Some misaligned characteristics reveal levers for the reformulation of the bread and present opportunities for segmenting the market. Several other implications of the findings for policy and future improvement of the bread are discussed.

Do Market-oriented Engendered Agriculture-health Interventions Affect Household Nutrition Outcomes: Evidence from an Orange-fleshed Sweetpotato Project in Rwanda.

The number of agricultural interventions promoting biofortified crops as a strategy to combat micronutrient malnutrition have increased significantly during the past decade. These interventions aim to improve the intake of key nutrients and sometimes other nutrition outcomes. In this study, we assess the impact of a market-oriented gender-sensitive agriculture-health project on household food consumption and food security. We use gender-disaggregated data from 842 sweetpotato farmers and a series of econometric techniques to assess the project's impact on food consumption household food security. The study finds unambiguous and strong impact of the project on both household food consumption and food security. Moreover, female-headed participant households benefitted much more from participation than did male-headed households. We further find that nonparticipant households would also have benefitted had they participated. The findings imply the importance of designing market-focused projects with a gender lens. They also imply that market-oriented agriculture-sensitive interventions do not necessarily harm the nutritional status of farm households.

Resilient agri-food systems for nutrition amidst COVID-19: evidence and lessons from food-based approaches to overcome micronutrient deficiency and rebuild livelihoods after crises.

COVID-19 has had an instant effect on food systems in developing countries. Restrictions to the movement of people and goods have impaired access to markets, services and food. Unlike other concurrent crises, rather than threatening the material hardware of food systems, COVID-19 has so far affected the 'software' of food systems, highlighting again that connectivity is at the heart of these systems. Drops in demand, the loss of markets and employment and growing concerns about international cooperation are indications of possible deeper disruptions to come. Amidst this uncertainty, strategies to safeguard food and nutrition security of the world's poor need to prioritize diversification of production and markets. Nutritious, biofortified crops such as potato, sweetpotato, but also wheat, maize and beans among others, can play a more significant role to provide key micronutrients (vitamin A, iron, zinc) at large scale. Strong local market chains, robust smallholder production systems and increasing commercial utilization make these crops powerful vehicles for securing nutrition when markets and mobility look uncertain. We posit that the evolving impacts of COVID-19 provide an opportunity to focus agricultural innovations, including the development and delivery of biofortified crops, on new and more specifically defined 'jobs to be done' throughout the food system. This will help bridge some of the current disruptions in supply and demand and will help prepare food systems for future crises.

Predictors of Intention to Integrate Biofortified Orange-fleshed Sweetpotato in Child Feeding: A Field Information Experiment in Rural Kenya.

The study assesses the psychosocial predictors of intention to integrate biofortified pro-vitamin A orange-fleshed sweet potato (OFSP) in proper complementary feeding (PCF) among women who received either verbal or verbal and visual demonstrations on OFSP-based foods. A total of 764 randomly selected women grouped into four categories, namely pregnant women, women with infants, women with young children, and potential mothers, participated in this study. Using a structural equation model of predicted intentions based on an extended Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) the study found goal-setting, perceived behavior control, subjective norms, and attitudes had a significant influence on intention to integrate OFSP in PCF. Unexpectedly, knowledge of the various health benefits of OFSP did not positively influence intention. Probabilistic recursive regression was then used to estimate the relationship between the intention to provide PCF practices and its potential antecedents. The results then showed that the model structure and explanatory power was information-specific and also revealing outcome differences by category of women. These results have implications on how interventions targeting the improvement of PCF should be organized and delivered. They underscore the need to segment the audience during nutrition education.

Nutrition and food security impacts of quality seeds of biofortified orange-fleshed sweetpotato: Quasi-experimental evidence from Tanzania.

This study examined the nutrition and food security impacts of a project that was designed to improve availability of disease-free planting materials of biofortified orange-fleshed sweetpotato (OFSP) in rural Tanzania. Difference-in-difference and matching techniques were employed to estimate causal effects using panel data. Participation in the project increased agronomic and nutritional knowledge of households, raised uptake rate for OFSP varieties, and improved food security status. Effects on nutrition are, however, weak. These results suggest that timely access to quality seeds accompanied by a transfer of skills is important to reduce barriers to adoption of biofortified crops with resulting positive effects on the welfare of rural households. Adequate promotion of both agronomic and nutrition aspects of the technologies may enhance nutrition effects.

Effect of nutrition education and psychosocial factors on child feeding practices: findings of a field experiment with biofortified foods and different women categories.

Despite the efforts to promote good practices in infant and young child feeding (IYCF), the adoption of such practices has been low. Using data from a sample of 665 women, and the theory of planned behavior, we examine the effect of different types of nutrition education and psychosocial factors on the use of recommended IYCF practices. Regression results show that nutrition education and psychosocial factors have strong positive effect on the extent to which IYCF practices are used, with the latter having conflicting individual but overall positive effect. Moreover, coefficients of latter were mostly less than those of the former indicating that pschosocial factors were less important in explaining variability in usage of IYCF than the nutrition education variables. It further finds that different sets of nutrition education and psychosocial factors affect different categories of women, with interactive nutrition education approaches having a greater effect. The findings also suggest need for targeting of beneficiaries with multiple nutrition education approaches.

The role of product information on consumer sensory evaluation, expectations, experiences and emotions of cricket-flour-containing buns.

Studies suggest that consumer' acceptance of edible insects can be enhanced by processing and blending them with familiar food products. This is however, expected to result in changes in some sensory attributes. In this study, we investigated how consumers evaluate the appropriateness of sensory attributes of a common bakery product (buns) that was blended with cricket-flour i.e., cricket-flour-containing (CFC) buns. We also tested whether provision of information can modulate the sensory evaluations, personal involvement and emotions. The study is based on a field experiment involving 432 participants drawn from rural communities in Kenya. Participants were randomly assigned to 3 information treatment groups: i) Control group - received only general information, ii) Treatment 1 - received general information and information about the benefits (i.e., positive attributes), iii) Treatment 2 - received general information and information about the potential drawbacks (i.e., negative attributes). Participants evaluated the CFC buns before and after tasting using Just-About-Right (JAR) scale. Results indicate that providing product information affected sensory evaluation of the product's sensory attributes. They also indicate that actual tasting of the CFC buns improved the convergence of sensory evaluation of the attributes towards the ideal level. Results further show that CFC buns elicited more positive feelings with little differences in the emotional profiles between the information treatments, which suggests general interest in the buns. These results provide useful insights on how to enhance consumer acceptance of insect-based foods. We discuss the implications of the findings.

Exploring the Influence of Differentiated Nutrition Information on Consumers' Mental Models Regarding Foods from Edible Insects: A Means-End Chain Analysis.

This study used a field experiment and means-end chain analysis to examine the effects of positive and perceived negative nutrition information on the households' motivations to consume insect-based foods. It used a random sample of households drawn from rural communities in Kenya. The study found that provision of nutrition information on benefits of edible insects and perceived negative aspects of insect-based foods influences participants' perceptions of insect-based foods and hence acceptance. We also found that tasting real products influenced the nature of mental constructs. The results provide marketers of edible insects with potential marketing messages for promotion.