Nuru Nigeria 2023 Endline Impact Report
Authors:  Heath Prince, Thomas Boswell, and Ashweeta Patnaik (Ray Marshall Center);  Bless Jima, Olayinka Orefunwa, and Amos Emmanuel (Nuru Nigeria);  Matt Lineal, Casey Harrison, and Ian Schwenke (Nuru International);  and Dena Bunnel (Doctoral Candidate, Kansas State University)
Date:  December 2023
Publication Type:  Report, 77pp.
This report is commissioned by Nuru International.

INTRODUCTION
This endline report shares the outcomes from the 4-year randomized control trial impact evaluation of Nuru Nigeria’s interventions, from 2019 to 2023 in northeastern Nigeria.  Nuru Nigeria’s vision is to cultivate lasting, meaningful choices in the most vulnerable and marginalized communities in the world.  By 2030, Nuru Nigeria intends to build resilient corridors of functioning locally-owned farmer cooperatives and profitable rural livelihoods in 12 Local Government Areas (LGAs) of northern Nigeria proximate to conflict-vulnerable areas.  In implementing interventions, Nuru Nigeria aims to equip rural, vulnerable households to improve livelihoods and build resilience capacities to cope with conflict, environmental, economic, and social shocks and stressors for stability and prosperity within the program implementation period.  This study focuses exclusively on Nuru Nigeria’s work in Adamawa State, the first LGA in which Nuru Nigeria began implementation.

This study tracks a number of indicators for the groups of farmers involved, including various short-term and long-term outcomes.  The primary objective for this study however is to measure resilience capacities and how Nuru Nigeria may affect them using the Nuru model of agricultural intervention.  This study aims to answer the question: “do Nuru Nigeria programs have a positive and statistically significant impact on adaptive, absorptive, and/or transformative resilience?”.

ADDITIONAL PUBLICATIONS
Evaluation Plan
Baseline Report
Midline Report

REPRODUCIBILITY
The authors of this study were committed to ensuring that the findings are reproducible.  To uphold this principle, meticulous strategies were implemented at every stage of the evaluation:

• Methodology Selection:  The study adopted the REAL Consortium methodology.
• Resilience Index Modules:  Modules for inclusion in the resilience index were predetermined before the baseline.  These modules were consistently used during the midline and endline evaluations.
• Survey Translation:  Questions were translated into Hausa to cater to the local audience.  A double-blind translation process ensured the accuracy and consistency of understanding, with the same translated text applied at each study time point.
• Data Accessibility:  The data, scrubbed of any personally identifiable information, are made available upon request to interested parties.  They can be accessed through a gated system, with users agreeing to adhere to usage terms.  This data is stored on a secure server, adhering to rigorous physical and data security standards.
• Open Access:  The initial evaluation plan, including methodological descriptions as well as a dataset to reproduce results and explore additional relationships can be requested here.

Nuru Ethiopia 2022 Impact Report
Authors: Heath Prince and Thomas Boswell (Ray Marshall Center); Tatek Amataw, Biruk Abayneh, and Zerihun Woldesenbet (Nuru Ethiopia); and Casey Harrison, Matt Lineal, and Ian Schwenke (Nuru International)
Date: July 2023
Publication Type: Report, 21pp.
This report is commissioned by Nuru International

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
In 2022, Nuru Ethiopia (NE) offered interventions in cooperative and rural livelihoods programming with 18,194 participant households in Gamo and Gofa Zones of Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples’ Region (SNNPR) of Ethiopia.  The intervention activities were punctuated by a shift in approach to supporting larger cooperative unions and cascading services to an increased number of primary cooperatives and farmers.  The intervention activities achieved the following outcomes:

Cooperative Impact
• NE-supported farmer organizations achieved an average SCOPEinsight score of 4.4 out of 5, demonstrating competitiveness at national, regional, and global levels for agricultural farmer organization businesses.
• 90% of NE-supported farmer organizations have achieved net profitability from their business operations as of 2022.
• NE-supported Hidota Union Cooperative achieved a 4% net profit margin as of 2022, which expands its ability to invest in member primary cooperatives and farmer livelihoods.

Agricultural Impact
• By participating in the diversified livelihood interventions, Nuru farmers were able to generate $411 USD of extra income, an increase of 77% compared to their 2020 baseline value of $233 USD and a continued increase over previous years.

In achieving impactful outcomes for households and cooperatives, NE interventions overcame significant weather shocks related to climate change and historic hyperinflation.  All NE operating areas in SNNPR were affected to a different degree by these shocks.  Still, NE successfully adapted its intervention activities to a new union approach that relies on digital development strategies and union cooperative staff to achieve impact for primary cooperatives and farmer households.  This shift toward lower-cost and higher visibility training and extension services began in 2021 and was mainstreamed in 2022.  This multi-year effort explains the significant increase in the number of farmers NE supported from 2021 to 2022.  In summary, NE overcame substantial obstacles, maintained impact, and significantly expanded the breadth and depth of its programming in 2022.

Nuru Kenya 2022 Dairy Report
Authors: Thomas Boswell and Heath Prince (Ray Marshall Center), and Fatuma Nyanjong (Nuru Kenya) Casey Harrison, Matt Lineal, and Ian Schwenke (Nuru International)
Date: December 2022
Publication Type: Report, 15pp.
This report is commissioned by Nuru International

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
In 2008, Nuru Kenya (NK) set out to provide meaningful choices that empower communities to lift themselves out of poverty in a sustainable way. The integrated Nuru model seeks to address three key areas of need: 1) food insecurity, 2) inability to cope with economic shocks and 3) unnecessary disease and death. From inception, NK developed agriculture, financial inclusion and healthcare programs as solutions for these areas of need by using a co-creative program planning process.

Programs have evolved over the years, and NK has been involved in an increasing number of programs and activities. This report reviews NK’s 2022 impact in the dairy sector, which represents a large portion of their overall programs across two counties, with data in Migori County stretching back to 2017, and new data becoming available this year in Homa Bay County, Kenya. To track impact in the dairy sector, the NK and Nuru International Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning teams collect and analyze data across programs using select survey and analysis methods. Since 2016, Nuru International has partnered with the Ray Marshall Center, an applied research and policy institute, to better understand program outcomes and impacts.

Within the Dairy Program, NK aims to increase milk yields and incomes for farmers, alongside the promotion of a suite of best practices for farmers to follow in order to ensure the best health and production of their animals, as well as provide training on fodder production, and artificial insemination to eligible farmers. Participant households are all members of farmer cooperatives, through which they receive services. Dairy inputs are disbursed on loan and coupled with training and extension services. As members of cooperatives, households repay their loans and increase on-farm income. This enables them to better cope with economic shocks. The cooperatives redistribute loan repayments as a revolving fund that members can access to support local economic growth.

Throughout Kenya, 2022 was a turbulent year. The COVID-19 pandemic continued to disrupt the economy, general elections in August 2022 led to months of economic stagnation due to fears of violence, and prices spiked to historic levels due to global inflation as well as the conflict in Ukraine which saw skyrocketing prices for key farm inputs and fuel for transportation. Despite these events, Nuru Kenya still had a very successful year in the dairy sector. Key findings of this Nuru Kenya 2022 Dairy Report include the following highlights:

• Nuru dairy farmers increased milk yields by 79% over the 2017 baseline, to an average of 3.22 liters per cow per day in Migori County.
• Net profit from dairy activities in 2022 was on average $237 per farmer in Migori County, an income increase of 180% over baseline in 2017.
• 89% of farmers in Migori County are now using best management practices, an increase from 55% of farmers adopting best practices in 2020. Nuru qualifies adoption as farmers adopting at least three of four critical dairy best management practices.
• In Homa Bay, Nuru Kenya was able to gauge initial baseline impact from program expansion, seeing farmers with an average annual net profit of $429, and an average yield of 5.83 liters per cow per day.