Evaluating the Heterogeneous Impact of Adoption of Climate-Smart Agricultural Technologies on Rural Household Welfare in Mali

This article investigates the empirical distributional impact of the adoption of Climate-Smart Agricultural Technologies (CSAT) on-farm households’ welfare using a data set that covers four regions, 32 communes, 320 villages, and 2240 households in Mali. Using the Instrumental Variable Quantile Regression model, the paper addresses the potential endogeneity arising from the selection bias and the heterogeneity of the effect across the quantiles of the outcome variables’ distribution. Results show that the adoption of CSAT is positively associated with improved households’ welfare and the farmers' decision to adopt any CSAT is positively and statistically influenced by access to credit, contact with extension agents, participation in training, access to information through the television and being a member of any organization such as cooperative society. Moreover, results further show that the effect of adoption of CSAT on household welfare varied across the different households. In particular, the results show that the impact of the adoption of CSAT on households’ welfare is generally higher for the poorest (people located at the bottom tail of the distribution) end of the welfare distribution. The findings, therefore, highlight the pro-poor impact of the adoption of CSAT in the rural Malian context, as well as the need to tailor the CSAT interventions toward specific socio-economic segments of the rural population in Mali.