Replication Data for: Conservation Agriculture in Africa: Evidence from Mozambique and Zambia

CA has been promoted as a technology for tackling southern Africa’s smallholder farmers’ economic and agricultural challenges such as decreasing food production, climate change and variability, and soil nutrient depletion for more than a decade. Despite the investment, empirical evidence suggests variable and often partial adoption rates. In Zambia, for example, wide discrepancies exist in CA adoption numbers and area reported in both peer-reviewed literature and unpublished project reports (Whitfield et al 2015 and Twomlow et al., 2008). Thus, lack of clarity on what constitutes CA adoption represents a huge challenge in the accurate calculation of adoption rates in southern Africa and the whole African continent at large. Knowledge of the geographical spread and the number of CA adopters is useful planning tool for policy and evaluating economic and poverty impact at both country and regional level. The practice of CA does not necessarily make a farmer an “adopter”. Understanding the different kinds of possible CA ‘adoptions’ is important in defining and contextualizing indicators that relate to the adoption process. Measuring adoption for complex technology packages such as CA, that farmers disentangle into smaller parts and only adopt components they perceive to fit their farming systems requires a two tier process. First, measuring whether or not the technology has been adopted at all. Secondly, analyzing which components are adopted in what combination by which types of farmers across time and space. In this brief, we establish and verify the extent CA adoption in Mozambique and Zambia based on regionally accepted key minimums for CA.十余年来，保护性农业（Conservation Agriculture，以下简称CA）作为一套农业技术方案，被推广用于应对南部非洲小农户面临的经济与农业挑战，包括粮食产量下降、气候变化及其变异性、土壤养分耗竭等问题。尽管已有相关投入，但实证研究表明，CA的采用率参差不齐，且往往仅为部分采用。以赞比亚为例，同行评审学术文献与未公开项目报告中所报道的CA采用农户数量及采用面积均存在显著差异（Whitfield等，2015；Twomlow等，2008）。因此，对CA采用的定义尚不明确，这成为准确计算南部非洲乃至整个非洲大陆CA采用率的一大严峻挑战。掌握CA的地理分布范围与采用农户数量，无论是在国家还是区域层面，都是制定政策、评估经济与减贫影响的实用规划工具。实施CA的实践并不必然使农户成为"CA采用者"。明确各类可能的CA"采用情形"，对于界定与采用过程相关的指标并对其进行情境化处理至关重要。针对CA这类复杂技术组合包——农户会将其拆解为多个子模块，仅采用那些适配自身耕作体系的组件——对其采用情况进行衡量，需要采用两步流程：第一步，确认该技术是否已被采用；第二步，分析不同类型的农户在不同时空维度下，采用了哪些组件以及采用的组合方式。在本简报中，我们基于南部非洲地区公认的CA核心最低标准，确定并验证了莫桑比克与赞比亚的CA采用程度。