Sustainable intensification and climate-smart agriculture initiatives promote complex systems-based
innovations to simultaneously improve yields and conserve natural resources. These innovations are
usually tested under near-perfect experimental conditions with purposively selected farmers. Using a
quasi-experimental approach and geographic information system, we evaluate a systems-based
sustainable intensification project in Malawi aiming at improving whole-farm productivity and
nutrition through integrated agricultural innovations. We find adopters of these innovations to
systematically differ from non-adopters and suggestive evidence of potential systematic targeting of
project locations and households. Econometric results using efficient influence function and
propensity score matching methods show consistently higher maize yield and value of harvest, on
average and across quantiles, for project beneficiaries, compared to that of randomly selected nonbeneficiary
households in non-target villages. Our findings highlight the need to rethink selection
criteria for systems-based innovations, something that could potentially bear severe implications upon
scaling up