Rural development extension agent turnover and farmer cooperative survival in Ethiopia: a discrete-time hazard analysis of staffing continuity

Extension agents are the operational link between Ethiopia's agricultural development bureaucracy and the farmer cooperatives that depend on their technical and organisational support. When agents leave, cooperatives lose a relationship that is difficult to replace. Because no observational data are available for estimation, the paper characterises the operating characteristics of the proposed design under a declared variance structure: between-cluster standard deviation of 6.0, residual standard deviation of 4.5, and intraclass correlation of 0.64. Power was estimated across 2000 design cells spanning cluster counts of 8, 16, 24 and 32 and effect sizes of 3, 5 and 8 percentage points. The design achieves 80 per cent power to detect a 5 percentage point effect with 54 clusters. Staffing continuity is a measurable organisational exposure rather than an unobserved cooperative attribute, and that discrete-time hazard models with time-varying covariates offer a defensible identification strategy for the question. The contribution is a design template and a power analysis that together specify what evidence would be required to establish whether extension agent turnover shortens cooperative life.