As a key pillar of the Ugandan economy, the agriculture sector is a critical driver of economic growth and poverty alleviation. Uganda's agricultural sector is dominated by smallholders with low levels of productivity. The agriculture sector is highly exposed to co-variant risks, which include weather, biological, infrastructure (post-harvest loss), price, and market risks. This plethora of risks suppresses appetite for investment in the sector. Despite the sector's contribution to the economy, farmers' access to finance remains a major constraint.
This report contains powerful stories, supported by data, of how World Bank Group projects have affected and transformed lives across East Asia and Pacific. There are also photographs that put a face on development statistics. The East Asia and Pacific region is home to more than two billion people. They live in more than 20 different countries; they speak more than 3,000 languages; they are farmers and fishermen, business men and women, students, workers, nomadic herders, all showing that a little can go a long way.
The Nile Story is one of immense challenges and remarkable achievements for the economic development of the region. It begins in 1999, when the ministers in charge of water affairs in the Nile countries agreed to form the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI). Between 2003 and 2015, the Nile Basin Trust Fund (NBTF) supported and coordinated cooperative work in the region, which has been delivered mainly through the NBI.
This new Africa Region Sustainable Development Series aims to focus international attention on a range of topics, spur debate, and use robust, evidence-based, informed approaches to advance policy dialogue and policy-making. This new Series synthesizes a large body of work from disparate sources, and uses simple language to convey the findings in an easily-digestible format. Ultimately, we want to seed solutions that can help accelerate the fight to end poverty in Africa.
Climate change is a huge challenge for the agriculture and rural development (ARD) sector in Romania. On the one hand, agriculture is a source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and must therefore be expected to contribute towards the climate change mitigation goals of the Europe 2020 strategy.
At an average above 6.0 percent per year over the past two decades, Uganda' s growth rate was impressive by all standards. In parallel, poverty declined significantly, not only in urban areas, but also to some extent within the rural areas. This combination was possible because the key drivers of growth were labor-intensive services sectors, some of which are agriculture based. In fact, Uganda's growth process has reduced overall poverty faster than what has been observed in many other developing countries.
The report builds on the 'towards a vision for agricultural innovation in Chile in 2030' report and is further based on a series of background papers and a consultation process that took place between December 2010 and May 2011. The current study is the third in a series of three that were agreed between the Government of Chile and the World Bank to support the development of a long-term agricultural innovation strategy. The first paper reviewed the functioning of the three main public technological institutes and recommended how their performance can be improved.
This paper aims to develop a vision statement for the agricultural sector that may then guide the future investments in Chile's agricultural innovation system, A joint and shared perspective on how the sector might look and what role agricultural innovation should play in getting there is a prerequisite for any effective strategy. But developing such a vision is not only a function of what the country wants: it also depends on the context in which Chile's agricultural sector will find itself.
Policy makers and development practitioners who are responsible for developing investment strategies to promote economic growth find many challenges in the changing face of agriculture in the twenty-first century. In addition to its productive role of providing food, clothing, fuel, and housing for a growing world population, agriculture assumes other roles, the importance of which has more recently been recognized. In addition to its essential role in food security, agricultural development is now seen as a vital and high-impact source of poverty reduction.
Livelihoods, food security, and development processes in Sub-Saharan Africa are highly dependent on land management practices to generate natural ecosystem goods and services. Out of a total population of about 717 million people, almost 60 percent depend for their livelihood on agriculture, hunting, fishing, or forestry. However, unsustainable land management already is leading to large-scale land degradation trends, which pose a threat to food security and poverty alleviation in Sub-Saharan Africa. Climate change threatens to exacerbate and add to the existing vulnerabilities.