Despite the major reform measures, including market, trade liberalization and a development strategy giving agriculture the leading role, the growth of the agricultural sector remains a major challenge for developing countries including Ethiopia. The growing demand for food and agricultural products to feed the population, deteriorating natural resources, vulnerable to recurrent drought and food insecurity are among the challenges confront policy makers and other change agents. Thus, our goal is to estimate the effect of agricultural development interventions on farm productivity and other expected outcomes accounting for attribution and challenges of the counterfactual that emanate from the nature of impact evaluation itself.

Efficient utilization of resources is one of the most important issues in the production process. Hence, the measurement of production efficiency has relevance for policy intervention, especially, in countries, where resources are meager and opportunities for developing and adopting better technologies are scarce. Frontier techniques have been widely used in determining the farm-level efficiency in developing countries’ agriculture since the publication of a seminal article of Farrell (1957) on efficiency measurement and subsequent development of several approaches to efficiency and productivity measurement. We analyzed the technical efficiency of teff (Eragrostis tef) producers in Ethiopia and potato producers in Benguet province, Philippines. Therefore, understanding how much producers achieve the maximum possible output from a given combination of inputs and identifying driving factors are among the focuses of our research.

Gender equality is indispensable component for sustainable economic growth and poverty reduction. While promoting gender equality and women empowerment as one of the major pillars of the previous Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the current Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), in many parts of the developing world, gender inequalities continue to be extreme. Gender inequality problems are particularly severe in rural areas in which women account for a significant contribution in agriculture. Studying gender issues using sex disaggregated data in agriculture including access and utilization of rural advisory services, production resources, agricultural technology adoption and yield, exploring the role of community led women empowerment initiatives to eradicate poverty and promote gender equality are among the focuses of this theme.