On-farm performance and farmers’ participatory assessment of new stress-tolerant maize hybrids in Eastern Africa

The present study was designed with the following objectives: i) to evaluate selected stress-tolerant maize hybrids developed by CIMMYT in eastern Africa under farmers’ conditions; ii) to identify farmers’ selection criteria in evaluating and selecting maize hybrids; iii) to let farmers evaluate the varieties and score them for the identified criteria and overall. In a novel approach, we also compared the importance of the different criteria, as stated by farmers, with the importance as revealed by regressing the overall evaluation score on the scores for the individual criteria, interpreting the coefficients as a weight or level of importance