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Armenia: Improving Rural Living Conditions

Mathematica designed and implemented an evaluation of initiatives in Armenia to determine their effectiveness in improving the living conditions of rural households. The initiative involved rehabilitating irrigation infrastructure and rural roads. It included training for 60,000 farmers to enable them to make good use of improved irrigation.

Our evaluation of the training component used a group random assignment design, in which village clusters were randomly assigned to the treatment or control group based on when the intervention was delivered. The random assignment of village clusters was conducted in August 2007 in a public setting to get village mayors and other stakeholders to buy in to random assignment as a fair way of allocating resources. The evaluation of the roads interventions was based on a regression-discontinuity design, and the evaluation of the irrigation improvements was based on a pre-post design, incorporating comparison groups where possible.

Mathematica helped design the sampling strategy for the national household survey, a key source of data for the roads and irrigation evaluations. We also designed the survey and sampling strategy for a new survey of farmers used to evaluate the training initiative. In addition, we provided guidance to the local data collection firm to ensure that high quality information was collected. Qualitative data and information from community leaders were also collected. Longitudinal follow-up surveys occurred in fall 2008.

Publications

"Baseline Report on the Tertiary Canal Survey" (December 2010)
"Baseline Report on the Farming Practices Survey" (December 2008)