Armenia - Water to Market Farmer Training

The survey covered farming households in rural communities that were included in the evaluation sample for the Water-to-Market impact evaluation.
The evaluation design for the WtM activities dictated the sampling frame and approach to the FPS. The target was to complete interviews with approximately 25 farmers in each of 189 village clusters that was selected to be in the evaluation of WtM training. Village clusters consist of up to 4 small, neighboring villages, and the 189 selected village clusters cover 211 villages. The village clusters are indicated in the variable "clusteringcode_b".

The baseline survey did not randomly sample respondents from the village clusters. The field team identified respondents for the FPS by working with village mayors to identify farmers who were likely to participate in WtM training so that a high proportion of farmers who were interviewed would have participated in training. The criteria were designed to align with the characteristics of farmers participating in ACDI's training programs, most notably, being actively engaged in farming, having modest farm area, living in the community for several years, and being between 25 and 70 years old.

AREG updated the sample list with the assistance of village mayors and marz officials, either at the marz offices or in the village itself. AREG and mayors targeted the households of farmers who were actively engaged in farming and had lived in the community for several years. Ultimately, a total of 4,715 farming households were interviewed for FPS1 in relevant communities. These same households were targeted for FPS3, which acheived a response rate of 75%.


Three villages that were originally sampled for the FPS were not surveyed at final follow-up. Two villages that were surveyed at baseline were not surveyed at final follow-up because they were found to have almost no active farmers. A third village was not accessible for the baseline FPS due to heavy snow. The rest of the villages in these WUAs were surveyed at baseline and final follow-up according to the sample design.

For FPS3, MCA-Armenia also added the objective of surveying recipients of MCA credit. As a result, the FPS3 was administered to 33 new farmers who had not been interviewed in FPS1 and had received MCA credit.


The FPS3 was administered to 3,547 households, 75 percent of households that participated in FPS1.


Nonresponse weights were constructed to account for households that responded to FPS1 and did not respond to FPS3. The variable "nonresp_wt" contains these weights. The nonresponse weights were computed by first calculating the propensity of a household's nonresponse in the FPS3. The second step in creating nonresponse weights was to use the predicted values from the response propensity models to create weighting cells. Within each research group (treatment and control), five weighting cells were created that were determined by the size of the predicted likelihood that the household responded to the survey. This resulted in a total of 10 (5 x 2) weighting cells. The same nonresponse weight was assigned within each of these 10 cells.

The third step was to create the nonresponse weight for each cell. The nonresponse weight was calculated by dividing the total number of households in each cell by the total number of households that responded to the survey in each cell. Finally, the weights were rescaled such that the sum of weights for the treatment group and the sum of weights for the control group each equal the original sample size of 4,715. Additional details of the calculations of nonresponse weights are provided in Appendix A of the Water-to-Market Evaluation report, which is provided as a resource document.

Impacts of the WtM training program were estimated within a regression framework that controlled for baseline measures. Standard errors for the impact estimates were clustered at the village cluster level using Huber-White style "sandwich" estimators. Standard errors for key impact estimates are provided in Appendix B of the Water-to-Market Evaluation report, which is provided as a resource document.