Ghana’s Feeder Roads Activity Evaluation
Project Description
As part of the Agriculture Project, MCC funding will support the rehabilitation of over 350 kilometers of feeder roads to reduce transportation costs and time, to increase access to major domestic and international markets, and to facilitate transportation linkages from rural areas to social service networks (including, for instance, hospitals, clinics and schools). The extent to which the feeder roads are rehabilitated or upgraded will depend upon, among others, their current condition, the present and projected traffic volume as a result of increased agricultural activity and productivity in those districts.
Logic Diagram
Evaluation Description
The impact evaluation of the Feeder Roads Activity will seek to answer the following question:
- Do improved roads lead to higher farm income through reduced input cost and higher producer price at the farm gate that are associated with reduced travel time and vehicle operating cost (transport cost)?
The evaluation will use a difference-in-differences strategy and examine the growth in outcome measures for farmers located near newly-constructed rural roads relative to farmers whose access to road transport did not change. The evaluation will estimate directly the short-run impact of road construction on input and consumer prices, transportation costs, and transportation times. Additionally, the evaluation will use spatial information from monitoring surveys to evaluate the long-term impact of road construction on farm sales, profits, technology, and farmer household welfare.
Data Collection
The evaluation will rely on an expanded version of the on-going national household living standards survey Ghana Living Standards Survey 5 (GLSS5) to cover enumeration areas in the program districts. This expanded survey, also known as GLSS5+, will be conducted jointly by the Ghana Statistical Service, the Institute for Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER) at the University of Ghana, and Yale University. In addition, a survey of prices at commercial markets of varying sizes linking roads and farming communities is being conducted by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC), directly contracted by Ghana’s Millennium Development Authority.