Replication Data for: Conservation Agriculture in Africa: Evidence from Mozambique and Zambia

CA has been promoted as a technology for tackling southern Africa’s smallholder farmers’ economic and agricultural challenges such as decreasing food production, climate change and variability, and soil nutrient depletion for more than a decade. Despite the investment, empirical evidence suggests variable and often partial adoption rates. In Zambia, for example, wide discrepancies exist in CA adoption numbers and area reported in both peer-reviewed literature and unpublished project reports (Whitfield et al 2015 and Twomlow et al., 2008). Thus, lack of clarity on what constitutes CA adoption represents a huge challenge in the accurate calculation of adoption rates in southern Africa and the whole African continent at large. Knowledge of the geographical spread and the number of CA adopters is useful planning tool for policy and evaluating economic and poverty impact at both country and regional level. The practice of CA does not necessarily make a farmer an “adopter”. Understanding the different kinds of possible CA ‘adoptions’ is important in defining and contextualizing indicators that relate to the adoption process. Measuring adoption for complex technology packages such as CA, that farmers disentangle into smaller parts and only adopt components they perceive to fit their farming systems requires a two tier process. First, measuring whether or not the technology has been adopted at all. Secondly, analyzing which components are adopted in what combination by which types of farmers across time and space. In this brief, we establish and verify the extent CA adoption in Mozambique and Zambia based on regionally accepted key minimums for CA.