ABSTRACT In the agricultural landscape of most developing countries, the last decade has witnessed the expansion of outsourced agricultural extension services. Private firms and nongovernmental organizations focused on delivering agricultural extension and advisory services to farmers have emerged. The Association for Resilience and Commitment to Food Security (ARESA) stands out as a key organization making a difference in Cameroon. In northern Cameroon, ARESA offers capacity‐building training to soybean farmers and helps them access improved soybean seeds. To inform stakeholders about the effectiveness of such initiatives, this study evaluates the impact of the support services provided by ARESA on the technical efficiency and financial returns of soybean farms in the North region of Cameroon. We apply stochastic production frontier analysis, inverse probability weighted regression adjustment (IPWRA), and propensity score matching (PSM) to data collected from 266 soybean farmers. Our results demonstrate that access to ARESA support services is associated with improvements in technical efficiency. We also observe a negative association between access to ARESA support services and both total production cost and total farm income. However, there are no significant associations between the support provided by ARESA and either net income or the profitability ratio. Our findings suggest that improvements in efficiency and cost reduction may not automatically translate into earnings for soybean farmers. The absence of significant improvements in farm income and profitability highlights the necessity to complement extension interventions with market‐oriented policies.
Wenda et al. (Fri,) studied this question.
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