Rural media, agricultural technology adoption and productivity: evidences from small rice farmers in Burkina Faso

In this paper we examine empirically the effect of Information and Communication Technologies on the adoption of improved rice varieties and its indirect effect on productivity with focus of the rural radio in Burkina Faso. The econometrics framework adopted is the Rubin Causal Model that has emerged as the standard approach for evaluating policy/program effect using an observational data. We found that adoption of modern varieties is significantly higher for the farmer that have listened radio program on rice before 2008 than those who have not. Also the use of rural radio appears to significantly increase the propensity of adopting modern varieties by 6%. We also estimate that the local average treatment effect of adoption of improved varieties induced by listening rice program radio on rice yield significantly positive. Ours results suggest that using rural radio could be an effective strategy to speed up the adoption of improved agricultural technologies and increase rice farmer productivity