Stepwise frameworks for understanding the utilisation of conservation agriculture in Africa

Despite the large and ongoing investment in the promotion of Conservation Agriculture (CA) to African smallholder farmers, currently available estimates of adoption provide little insight into the realities of their use. Both the technologies and their adoption tend to be poorly defined, leading to large variation in estimates and validity issues. To address this void, we propose two independent but complementary frameworks: the Conservation Agriculture Appraisal Framework (CAAF) is used to quantify the intensity of implementation of CA; and the Process of Agricultural Utilisation Framework (PAUF) is used to classify various types of use and non-use by disaggregating the adoption process into ten stages. These frameworks are applied to household survey data across five eastern and southern African countries from 1,601 village and 6,559 households. Overall, we find a general overestimation of adoption of CA and CA components. By considering in more detail the intensity of implementation and the types of use and non-use, new meaning is found in the status and contributors to limited CA utilisation. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.