This report summarizes the findings of the Nigeria Agriculture Public Expenditure Review (NAGPER). The NAGPER was undertaken to achieve four main objectives: (i) establish a robust data base on public expenditure in the agricultural sector; (ii) diagnose the level and composition of agricultural spending in the recent past; (iii) understand the budget processes that determine resource allocation in the sector; and (iv) draw preliminary policy recommendations for agriculture. These objectives are admittedly modest.
Agriculture remains fundamental for Nicaragua from both a macroeconomic and social view. It is the largest sector of the Nicaraguan economy, and it remains the single biggest employer with around 30 percent of the labor force and including processed foods, like meat and sugar, agriculture accounts for around 40 percent of total exports value. Nicaragua appears to be gradually losing competitive edge of some of its key agricultural exports within the most important export markets.
West Africa’s smallholders are dynamic and innovative and, if given the opportunity, could easily and sustainably double or treble their productivity. This would have a huge impact on the region’s food security and economic growth. The Convergence of Sciences programme has spent the past decade exploring new pathways for agricultural innovation that focus on enabling smallholders to capture opportunity.
Disasters are increasing worldwide, with more devastating effects than ever before. While the absolute number of disasters around the world has almost doubled since the 1980s, the average number of natural disasters in Middle East and North Africa (MNA) has almost tripled over the same period of time. In the MNA, the interplay of natural disasters, rapid urbanization, water scarcity, and climate change has emerged as a serious challenge for policy and planning.
This is the first investment climate assessment (ICA) for Myanmar. The main objectives of this ICA are to: (i) provide an up-to-date and fact-based analysis of the business environment for the government and other stakeholders in Myanmar to help prioritize and contextualize the reform agenda, and (ii) to offer a baseline for future assessments of progress in terms of the investment climate reform agenda. As requested by the government, the Myanmar ICA will directly support the ongoing reform program.
This tool is designed for reviewing the partnership to assess whether it is achieving the goals of the individual actors or partner organisations. It is essentially a ‘health check’ of the innovation partnership. This tool can offer an opportunity to the partners to reflect on the value of the partnership from their own organization’s perspective. It also helps to assess what-if any- changes would improve the effectiveness of the partnership and to agree as a group to any revisions to the partnership agreement taking into account the findings of the review process.
Within the context of the European-funded JOLISAA FP7 project (JOint Learning in Innovation Systems in African Agriculture), several agricultural innovation experiences focused on smallholders were assessed in Benin, Kenya and South Africa. Fifty-six cases were characterised through review of grey literature and interviews with resource persons according to a common analytical framework inspired by the innovation systems perspective. Of these, 13 were assessed in greater depth through semistructured interviews, focus-group discussions and multistakeholder workshops.
Agricultural production is a crucial and fundamental aspect of a stable society in China that depends heavily on the climate situation. With the desire to achieve future sustainable development, China’s government is taking actions to adapt to climate change and to ensure food self-sufficiency.
Iran faces environmental challenges such as erosion and extreme events, namely droughts and floods. These phenomena have frequently affected the country over the past decades and temperature rise has led to a more challenging situation. Iran started to implement national and provincial policies in the 1950s to cope with these phenomena. To provide an overview of Iran’s efforts to tackle land degradation and climate change, this paper examined through literature since 2000 the stakeholders’ policies, their interventions and obstacles to the mitigation of these environmental challenges.
The Kenya agricultural carbon project is breaking new ground in designing and implementing climate finance projects in the agricultural sector. The project is regarded as an innovative example for climate-smart agriculture within and outside the World Bank. For the first time, while increasing productivity and enhancing resilience to climate change, smallholder farmers in Africa will receive payments for greenhouse gas mitigation based on sustainable agricultural land management. Quantification of carbon sequestration is monitored based on a newly developed carbon accounting methodology.