Framework for analyzing the socio-economic impacts of agroforestry projects

To address this gap in agroforestry analysis, the USDA/USAID Forestry Support Program and the Southeastern Forest Experiment Station are cooperating to develop and test data collection and analytical techniques for assessing the socioeconomic impacts of agroforestry projects. This paper represents the first step in this process by presenting a preliminary framework for rigorous, agroforestry, socioeconomic impact assessment. The framework emphasizes assessment of impacts on farmer income and productivity in general, and the distribution of those impacts within and between households and communities. It addresses the problem cited above of applying conventional agricultural and forestry project analysis to agroforestry systems by combining a variety of standard data collection and statistical and econometric analytical techniques in an innovative manner. The framework will be field tested in three case studies during 1993-94, one each in Southeast Asia, Central America, and Africa. The results of the field tests will be used to refine the framework, produce specific guidelines for socioeconomic impact analysis of agroforestry projects, and to make recommendations for improving project design, implementation, and extension methods. They will also allow determination of the likelihood of success for socioeconomic impact assessment given financial and human resource constraints of the assessment team, and the characteristics of the agroforestry project, such as levels of previous monitoring and evaluation and the geographic, cultural, and socioeconomic characteristics of the project site. (Author abstract)