Armenia: Improving Rural Living Conditions

Mathematica is designing and implementing an evaluation of initiatives in Armenia to determine their effectiveness in improving the living conditions of rural households. The initiative involves rehabilitating irrigation infrastructure and rural roads. It also involves training 60,000 farmers to enable them to make good use of improved irrigation.

Our evaluation of the training component uses a group random assignment design, in which village clusters are randomly assigned to the treatment or control group based on when the intervention is 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 is based on a regression-discontinuity design, and the evaluation of the irrigation improvements is based on a pre-post design, incorporating comparison groups where possible.

Mathematica is helping design the sampling strategy for the national household survey, which is the 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 is collected. Qualitative data and information from community leaders are also being collected. The first round of longitudinal follow-up surveys occurred in fall 2008.

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