La formulación, implementación y gestión de proyectos de desarrollo rural requiere procesos de participación que induzcan la acción colectiva. Estos procesos necesitan nuevas estructuras sociales donde se involucre a la sociedad civil organizada, como los llamados Grupos de Acción Local (GAL) creados en el contexto de la iniciativa europea LEADER.
En este artículo se aborda la temática de las experiencias exitosas de las organizaciones sociales en el Corredor Biológico Mesoamericano a partir de una evaluación participativa de la cual surgieron 22 indicadores que permiten medir, ya sea de forma cuantitativa o cualitativa el desarrollo de los proyectos.
Los nuevos modelos de transferencia de tecnología aplicados desde la década de los noventa al sector rural mexicano han tenido como resultado bajas coberturas, en 2010 sólo el 2% de 5.5 millones de unidades de producción rural contaban con este servicio. En busca de mejorar la eficiencia y eficacia de los recursos públicos, se propone una estrategia para incrementar la cobertura de transferencia de tecnología en el sector rural. Se analizaron 11 casos de agentes de cambio que intervinieron en 2010 con procesos de transferencia de tecnología.
La presentación explica qué tipo de indicadores se pueden usar para valorar la extensión rural.
This study aims to explore how the Positive Deviance approach can be adapted to identify and prioritize rural development interventions for diverse farming households that pursue multiple objectives. We describe the adapted approach, consisting of three research steps, and a case study implementation in Tanzania. Based on this experience, the potential of the Positive Deviance approach for household-specific prioritization of multi-objective development opportunities is discussed
The use of mobile phones has increased rapidly in many developing countries, including in rural areas. Besides reducing the costs of communication and improving access to information, mobile phones are an enabling technology for other innovations. One important example are mobile phone based money transfers, which could be very relevant for the rural poor, who are often underserved by the formal banking system. We analyze impacts of mobile money technology on the welfare of smallholder farm households in Kenya.
Many of the world’s food-insecure and undernourished people are smallholder farmers in developing countries. This is especially true in Africa. There is an urgent need to make smallholder agriculture and food systems more nutrition-sensitive. African farm households are known to consume a sizeable part of what they produce at home. Less is known about how much subsistence agriculture actually contributes to household diets, and how this contribution changes seasonally. We use representative data from rural Ethiopia covering every month of one full year to address this knowledge gap.
The role of genetically modified (GM) crops for food security is the subject of public controversy. GM crops could contribute to food production increases and higher food availability. There may also be impacts on food quality and nutrient composition. Finally, growing GM crops may influence farmers’ income and thus their economic access to food. Smallholder farmers make up a large proportion of the undernourished people worldwide. Our study focuses on this latter aspect and provides the first ex post analysis of food security impacts of GM crops at the micro level.
Productivity growth in smallholder agriculture is an important driver of rural economic development and poverty reduction. However, smallholder farmers often have limited access to information, which can be a serious constraint for increasing productivity. One potential mechanism to reduce information constraints is the public agricultural extension service, but its effectiveness has often been low in the past.
Land-use changes have dramatically transformed tropical landscapes. We describe an ecological-economic land-use change model as an integrated, exploratory tool used to analyze how tropical land-use change affects ecological and socio-economic functions. The model analysis seeks to determine what kind of landscape mosaic can improve the ensemble of ecosystem functioning, biodiversity, and economic benefit based on the synergies and trade-offs that we have to account for.