Planning for an Impact Evaluation in Ethiopia

An ADHENO tree nursery 

Julia Entwistle - School for Environment and Sustainability



ADHENO is an Ethiopian non-profit organization implementing environmental restoration and economic empowerment programs in the North Shoa region. Their work includes various trainings for smallholder farmers on environmentally sustainable management practices such as terracing, use of improved seeds, water run off mitigation, and intercropping. Much of ADHENO’s environmental restoration work is aimed at reducing the rate of erosion. Loss of soil matter and nutrients due to heavy rains and steep slopes in the region is a major concern for farmers. Another key program that ADHENO operates is called tree gudifecha, which is an afforestation program where farmers are paid to adopt and care for trees. Additionally, ADHENO is also involved in the construction of improved drinking water sources, supporting children’s education through payment of school fees, and training farmers on beekeeping.

Many farmers utilize terracing as a way of
reducing soil erosion on the steep slopes

As part of a team of four graduate students from the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan, I am spending the summer in Ethiopia to perform an impact evaluation of ADHENO’s programs. To accomplish this, my team is evaluating the impacts on farmer’s livelihoods as well as the ecological outcomes of ADHENO’s work. My role is mainly in measuring the former and to do so we are creating a household survey aimed at assessing farming management practices, crop yield, and other indicators of wellbeing, such as income and health. Our goal is to administer the survey with both households who have participated in ADHENO’s programs as well as those who have not as a means of comparison. To do this we are enlisting the help of several translators to act as our local guides as well as conduct the in person surveys with the farmers. Our translators are more than capable of this job, however getting an idea across different cultures and languages can sometimes be a challenging task.

In the rural area where we are staying, few people know more than some basic English. One of my first days here, I crossed paths with a man who spoke a small amount of English. As a group of monkeys ran across the path in front of us, he pointed and exclaimed, “monkey!” He then began pointing to things and asking me the English word for them, rock… cow… tree…

When I said tree, he looked at me with a puzzled expression, then pointed to a patch of grass, “tree?” he asked. I shook my head, “grass”. “Why not tree?” he asked. For lack of a better explanation, I said “trees are tall”. He accepted this description and we moved on. This conversation would come to shed some light on a translation challenge we were about to encounter.

A farmer looks over an area to become part of
ADHENO's tree gudifecha program

While in the process of translating our survey into the local language, one of the translators paused when he came to the first question asking about tree adoption. “There is no word for this in Amharic,” he told us, referencing the word tree. We were baffled, there were trees all around us, surely there was a word for this. He went on to explain that they called each tree by its species name, and there was no generic term that referred to all trees. I thought back to my conversation with the man on the path. We would need to come up with a more accurate definition for the household survey than “trees are tall”.