46 CHAPTER 5
their incomes in the first year of participation. It is likely that beneficiaries in the poorest tercile will see their incomes increase significantly after starting to benefit from their investments in productive assets, which, as discussed above, increased significantly. The significant impact of Fadama II on the unmatched sample could be due to nonproject effects. These results under- score the important role that initial conditions play in benefiting from CDD that targets the poor. Hence in addition to the strong institutions required to address elite capture, initial conditions of wealth also could limit the impact of well-targeted CDD projects on women and the poor. Such beneficiaries may not benefit as much as men and the well-off beneficiaries—at least in the short run.
Here we relay a brief example that illustrates the large impact of the program on beneficiary incomes.6 A group of 20 women from Adamawa joined Fadama II, raised money to pay for the matching funds, and acquired a mill- ing machine. The average daily income from the milling machine is at least 1,000 nairas, which is 50 nairas per group member or 11,250 nairas per year— assuming the machine works for only five days a week and for 45 weeks per year. This amount is equivalent to a 35 percent increase in income for the female-headed households whose per household income was 35,000 nairas per year before joining Fadama II.
In summary, beneficiaries of Fadama II have realized significant increases in their incomes. Using the PSM and double-difference methods, our results allow us, with considerable confidence, to attribute the income increases among beneficiaries to participation in the project.
However, the impact of Fadama II is different across agroecological zones and asset terciles. The impact of Fadama II on income was not statistically significant in the humid forest and moist savannah zones and across gender, although increases in mean incomes of Fadama II beneficiaries were observed in all cases.7 Beneficiaries in the lowest and highest asset terciles also did not realize statistically significant different income growth because of participa- tion in the project (although the estimated mean impact was large and positive for the poorest asset tercile). The impacts of the project are not fully captured by this study, because the project had been in operation for only one full year when the survey was done; thus our results do not capture the delayed effects of productive assets, rural infrastructure, and other project interventions. However, the study has collected a good baseline that could be used to conduct follow-up studies to capture the longer-term impacts of the project.
6 Other success stories of Fadama II can be accessed at <
http://fadama.org/>. 7 In the unmatched sample, income of beneficiaries fell, but the change was not significant at p = 0.10.
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