Can women's self-help groups improve access to information, decision-making, and agricultural practices? The Indian case.

Effective agricultural extension is key to improving productivity, increasing farmers' access to information, and promoting more diverse sets of crops and improved methods of cultivation. In India, however, the coverage of agricultural extension workers and the relevance of extension advice is poor. We investigate whether a women's self-help group (SHG) platform could be an effective way of improving access to information, women's empowerment in agriculture, agricultural practices, and production diversity.

Reimagining cost recovery in Pakistan's irrigation system through willingness-to-pay estimates for irrigation water from a discrete choice experiment.

It is widely argued that farmers are unwilling to pay adequate fees for surface water irrigation to recover the costs associated with maintenance and improvement of delivery systems. In this paper, we use a discrete choice experiment to study farmer preferences for irrigation characteristics along two branch canals in Punjab Province in eastern Pakistan. We find that farmers are generally willing to pay well in excess of current surface water irrigation costs for increased surface water reliability and that the amount that farmers are willing to pay is an increasing function of their existing surface water supply as well as location along the main canal branch.