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Educational Outreach Programs for Women: Improving Farm Women´s Proficiency in Farm Business Management

Lynn Hambleton

Summary

The mission of Annie’s Project-Education for Farm Women is “to empower farm women to be better business partners through networks and by managing and organizing critical information.” This study seeks to determine the extent to which women’s skill sets improved as a result of participating in Annie’s Project. Illinois farm women who participated in Annie’s Project were given a pre-test or baseline survey which measured farming practices in the five areas of risk (production, marketing, financial, legal and human resource). The women were later resurveyed. The improvement is measured by calculating the percent increase in ‘yes’ responses from the baseline to the post-test. Preliminary small sample results suggest an overall increase of 11%. The category which had the smallest percent increase in ‘yes’ responses is the production area. The strongest improvement occurred in the financial category. A regression analysis was also performed to determine whether socio-economic variables, such as marital status and number of children, play a role in the percent increase in ‘yes’ responses. Preliminary findings suggest that descriptors explain very little about the percentage increase in ‘yes’ responses. In particular the explanatory variable ´years experience´ only accounted for .04% of the variance in the dependent variable, which is percent increase in ‘yes’ responses. Additionally, none of the other variables had a significant impact on the percentage increase. A test of means reveals that the percentage change in ´yes´ responses from the pre-test to the post-test is highly significant at the .05 level. In other words, there will be a significant increase in the number of ´yes´ responses but we cannot say which groups of women were more impacted.

Details

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