Study title

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.The Household Survey for Evaluation of Livelihoods Project in Armenia, 2013 was collected by Oxfam GB as part of the organisation's Global Performance Framework. Under this framework, a small number of completed or mature projects are selected at random each year for an evaluation of their impact, known as an Effectiveness Review. This data was used to evaluate the impact of the 'new economic opportunities for small scale farmers in Tavush and Vayots Dzor regions' project, which was implemented between April 2010 and November 2012 by Oxfam and other partner organisations. The overarching objective of the project was to support smallholder farmers to secure sustainable livelihoods through increasing access to economic opportunities in agricultural value chains and increasing their ability to withstand natural disasters related to climate change. Farmers' cooperatives were established in the targeted communities. These cooperatives provided a platform through which most other project activities were implemented at community and household level. Eight villages were targeted in the first year with more added to implementation in subsequent years. The focus of the evaluation was on the impact of the project on participating household in these eight villages, in which implementation had started earliest. Two hundred households, all direct beneficiaries of the project, were sampled from these villages while 400 households were sampled from 15 neighbouring villages in which the project had not been implemented; these provided a 'comparison group' against which the beneficiary households were compared. At the analysis stage, the statistical tool of propensity-score matching was used to control for demographic and baseline (before project implementation) differences between the beneficiary and comparison households surveyed. Main Topics:The main topics covered included: climate change...