The effectiveness of the public agricultural extension service in Kenya has been, and continues to be, a controversial issue. Two successive IDA-funded projects, the National Extension Projects I and II (NEP-I and II) have supported agricultural extension since 1982, at which time the World Bank introduced the Training and Visit (T&V) system of management. The objective of the projects was to make the Kenyan extension service more effective and efficient.
Towards the end of NEP-I in 1990, the Africa Technical Department of the World Bank undertook a study to evaluate the impact of the agricultural extension projects it had supported in Kenya and Burkina Faso. The Kenya study (Bindlish and Evenson, 1993) estimated the returns to extension at 350% (marginal internal rate of return), with a “lower bound” estimate of 160%. The returns to extension in Burkina Faso (Bindlish, Evenson and Gbetibouo, 1993) were estimated in a similar fashion at 91%. These studies and their findings received wide attention in the Bank and elsewhere.
