longitudinal study has been extensively described in Quisumbing (2007); only a brief summary focusing on the agricultural technology study sites is presented here. The agricultural technology study originally surveyed 47 villages in three sites in in 1996-97, each site chosen as part of an impact evaluation of programmes disseminating new agricultural technologies.6 Commercial vegetable technologies were disseminated in Saturia thana, district, referred to below as Saturia; polyculture fish production technologies were provided in two sites, Sadar thana, , referred to below as Jessore, and Gaffargaon thana, district and Pakundia and Kishoreganj Sadar thanas, , referred to as Mymensingh below, in combination with specific extension programmes for disseminating these technologies. Saturia and Mymensingh are located in the central part of Bangladesh, whereas Jessore is in the west, close to Calcutta and the Indian border. In two sites (Saturia and Jessore), technologies were introduced through non-governmental organization (NGO) programmes targeted exclusively to women, who were provided training and credit. At the third site (Mymensingh), the Mymensingh Aquaculture Extension Project (MAEP) and 15 Department of Fisheries‘ extension agents provided training to relatively better-off households, and training with credit to relatively poorer households, directed at both men and women, but men more often than women. The primary distinction between the two polyculture fish production sites is that, in Jessore, the NGO (Banchte Shekha) had arranged long-term leases of ponds that are managed by groups of women (ranging in number from five to 20). In Mymensingh, ponds are owned and managed by single households or households that have shared ownership. The NGO programmes in Saturia and Jessore are still operational, though with several modifications, but the aquaculture extension programme in Mymensingh has ended and has been absorbed by the regular Department of Fisheries extension system. In designing the original evaluation surveys, careful attention was paid to establishing both intervention and comparison/control groups so that single difference estimates of short-term project impact could be derived. In the agricultural technology evaluation, villages were selected randomly to include those with and without the intervention. An equal number of households were interviewed in villages which had and had not benefited from the dissemination of three different technologies (improved vegetables, group fishponds and individual fishponds). A village census was used to draw up the sampling frame, and both adopters and non-adopters of the technologies were selected randomly from the relevant sampling frames and strata. The agricultural technology study also included a cross-section of all other non-adopting households representative of the general population in the villages. Table 1 summarizes the sample for each of the three types of agricultural technologies included in the original evaluation survey, and lists the number of program and control households in each site. For households in each of these groups, a four-round survey in 1996-97 collected detailed information on production and other income-earning activities by individual family member, expenditures on various food, health and other items, food and nutrient intakes by

6 The description of the 1996–7 survey draws on Quisumbing and de la Brière (2000).

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