Climate-smart agriculture in Zambia
Profiling the Enterprises
Twenty-six firms selling climate-smart technologies. With twenty-six of anything you learn more by asking than by modelling.
Every other note here is about farmers. This one is about the companies selling them the technology, and it is the part of the research that used no econometrics at all.
The problem came first. There is no register of climate-smart agriculture enterprises in Zambia, so before anything could be studied a list had to be built. That was done by digital mapping, working outward from an existing programme registry and from what firms said about each other, until the same names kept coming back.
Twenty-six firms were then profiled on nine dimensions: legal form, ownership structure, scale of operation, sectoral emphasis, technology portfolio, revenue model, client segments, geographic reach, and whether they wrapped training, after-sales support or credit around the product.
The evidence came from a structured survey, interviews, the firms’ own documents, and validation in the field, with the four cross-checked against each other. That is a deliberate choice rather than a fallback. With twenty-six of anything, a model has almost nothing to work with, and asking a firm why it stopped selling a product gets you an answer no regression could recover.
What it cannot do
Twenty-six firms are not a census and they are not a random sample. Nothing here supports a statement about the population of Zambian agricultural enterprises, and the study does not make one.
The mapping method also has a bias built into it. Working outward from a registry and from referrals finds firms that are connected to programmes and to each other. A firm operating quietly in one district, in nobody’s network, is exactly the firm this approach misses, and there is no way to know how many of those there are.
Further reading
- Bowen, G. "Document Analysis as a Qualitative Research Method".On using an organisation’s own paperwork as evidence rather than as background.
From the Zambia climate-smart agriculture research, built on the Water and Soil Accelerator household survey, which was funded by USAID. The thesis is under examination and the three papers drawn from it are under anonymous peer review, so there is nothing to link to yet.