Section 5: Assessment of Impact of Technologies in West Africa: Estimation of Welfare Effects of Technologies Developed in One Location and Used in Another Location

One of the methodological objectives of this study was to develop and evaluate methods for extrapolating the impact of new technology from the areas in which experimental or field trial data exist to other locations. In Section 1, we describe the use of the concept of geographic equivalence to provide first order approximations of zones of adaptation or areas where the geographic similarities would allow one to predict the results of using the new technology. In Section 4, we describe the use of the ACT and EPIC to compute predicted yields based on biophysical considerations with results summarized in politically defined areas. In this section, we describe two case studies in West Africa which were used to estimate regional impacts of new sorghum and peanut technology. We modeled the extrapolation of the sorghum production system described in Section 4 for Mali for other areas in Mali (past where experimental data were available) and in Senegal and Burkina Faso.