Biofortification, crop adoption and health information: - Impact pathways in Mozambique and Uganda

Biofortification, breeding staple food crops to be a dense source of essential micronutrients, is fast emerging as a strategy to fight micronutrient malnutrition. Large scale investments in biofortification are being made in dozens of developing countries, but until now there has been little rigorous evidence of the impact of these investments and the strategies that can make biofortification successful. This paper reports findings from randomized impact evaluations conducted in Mozambique and Uganda to study the impact of large-scale pilot projects conducted in 2006-2009 to introduce provitamin-A-rich orange-fleshed sweet potato (OFSP) to 24,000 farming households as a strategy to reduce vitamin A deficiency. In both countries, projects randomly assigned interventions of di↵erent cost and intensity to distribute OFSP vines, train households on how to grow OFSP, and the health benefits of vitamin A. We compare the impact of the interventions within and across the two countries on OFSP adoption, knowledge about vitamin A, and dietary intake of vitamin A by children. We use causal mediation analysis (Imai et al. 2011) to examine the impact pathways on consumption of vitamin A operating through access to the OFSP technology, adoption decisions, and nutrition knowledge. After two years of intervention the project led to OFSP adoption rates of 61-68 percent among project households, improved household knowledge about vitamin A and nearly doubled average dietary intake of vitamin A in both countries. Evidence suggests that nutrition trainings played a small role in the impact on vitamin A consumption. Estimates show that specific messages about nutrition contributed not more than 5 percent of project impacts on dietary intakes of vitamin A. We estimate the upper bound on the role of nutrition information of not more than 20 percent of impact, suggesting that the substantial gains in vitamin A intakes can primarily be attributed to vine access. ⇤Alan de Brauw and Daniel Gilligan are Senior Research Fellows, International Food Policy Research Institute, 2033 K Street NW, Washington, DC 20006; Patrick Eozenou is an Economist at the World Bank; Neha Kumar is a Research Fellow, International Food Policy Research Institute; and J.V. Meenakshi is a Professor of Economics at the University of Delhi. We also want to thank Mary Arimond, Howarth Bouis, Alicia Carriquiry, Christine Hotz, Ricardo Labarta, Jan Low, and Mourad Moursi for further contributions to the field work and variable construction that were essential to this manuscript. Please direct correspondence to Alan de Brauw at [email protected] or at the address listed above. All remaining errors are our responsibility.