Evaluating a Publicly Funded, Privately Delivered Agricultural Extension System in Honduras

Agricultural extension continues to offer hope for improving the lives of rural poor in the developing world. Yet the difficulty of achieving that goal persists. This paper proposes a four-stage decision tree for implementing and evaluating the economic sustainability of extension programs that focuses on sources, delivery methods, evaluations, and fiscal support. It then evaluates the costeffectiveness of a publicly-funded, privatelydelivered agricultural extension program for small, poor farmers on the hillsides of Honduras and shows how an agricultural extension project can be evaluated with a relatively inexpensive methodology using data generated by individual outsourced extension projects.