Growth and Productivity in Agriculture and Agribusiness : Evaluative Lessons from World Bank Group Experience

The World Bank Group has a unique opportunity to match the increases in financing for agriculture with a sharper focus on improving agricultural growth and productivity in agriculture-based economies, notably in Sub-Saharan Africa. Greater effort will be needed to connect sectoral interventions and achieve synergies from public and private sector interventions; to build capacity and knowledge exchange; to take stock of experience in rain-fed agriculture; to ensure attention to financial sustainability and to cross-cutting issues of gender, environmental, and social impacts and climate; and to better integrate the World Bank Group support at the global and regional levels with that at the country level. This evaluation uses the typology of economies developed by the Agriculture for Development: World Development Report 2008 as one classification in its analysis. In the agriculture-based category, which includes most of Sub-Saharan Africa, development of the agriculture sector is essential to growth and poverty reduction, yet productivity is low, constrained by limited access to modern inputs, irrigation, communication, and transport. The World Bank Group support focused on alleviating these constraints is important to help achieve poverty reduction.