Mali is a vast, land-locked country in West Africa with a population of approximately 14.9 million, and a GDP per capita of USD480. The economy is largely rural, with over two-thirds of the population living off agriculture, notably cotton. Gold is the country’s largest export, though production has been declining and the industry faces an uncertain future as proven reserves are limited. The service sector, which represents 40 percent of GDP, is dominated by trade and commerce. Mali’s dependence on crops and gold makes it vulnerable to terms of trade shocks.
The Sourcebook is the outcome of joint planning, continued interest in gender and agriculture, and concerted efforts by the World Bank, FAO, and IFAD. The purpose of the Sourcebook is to act as a guide for practitioners and technical staff inaddressing gender issues and integrating gender-responsive actions in the design and implementation of agricultural projects and programs. It speaks not with gender specialists on how to improve their skills but rather reaches out to technical experts to guide them in thinking through how to integrate gender dimensions into their operations.
Land and property rights, migration, and citizenship are complex issues that cut across all social, economic, and political spheres of West Africa. This paper provides an overarching scoping of the most pressing contemporary issues related to land, migration, and citizenship, including how they intersect in various contexts and locations in West Africa. The way issues are analytically framed captures structural challenges and sets them against the regional and global meta-trends of which policy makers and practitioners should be aware for conflict-sensitive planning.
In Ethiopia, village surveys were conducted in six villages and two expert workshops were organized to discuss the organization of the study and to evaluate the draft results. Based on household surveys, focus group discussions, and institutional stakeholder interviews, we assessed household vulnerability, analyzed the strategies households adopt to reduce the hazards faced, and evaluated the assistance households receive from institutions. Vulnerability profiles were formulated, which show that household vulnerability differs substantially among and within villages.
The objective of this report is to identify and evaluate best practices in smallholder private irrigation in West Africa. The report is based on a comparative assessment of the smallholder private irrigation subsector in Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, and Nigeria, which included a literature review, field visits, and workshops at both national and regional levels. The task lists for the assessment is provided in annex one. This report first presents the main features of smallholder irrigation and the development projects that have promoted its use in West Africa in chapter two.
This document provides an investment plan for climate-smart agriculture (CSA) in Mali, developed with support of the AAA Initiative and the World Bank, and technical assistanceof the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, the World Agroforestry Centre and the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture, Climate Change and Food Security (CCAFS). It identifies specific interventions that define on-the-ground action that are consistent with Mali’s NDC and national agricultural strategy, which can be funded by public and private sector partners.
African agriculture is currently at a crossroads, at which persistent food shortages are compounded by threats from climate change. But, as this book argues, Africa can feed itself in a generation and help contribute to global food security. To achieve this Africa has to define agriculture as a force in economic growth by: advancing scientific and technological research; investing in infrastructure; fostering higher technical training; and creating regional markets.
Over the years, CTA has contributed to building ACP capacity to understand innovation processes, strengthen the agricultural innovation system and embed innovation thinking in agricultural and rural development strategies. The CTA Top 20 Innovations project set out to prove that innovation is taking place in ACP agriculture and in the process has demonstrated that smallholder farmers are beneficiaries as well as partners in agricultural innovation.
Since February 2014, Mercy Corps has implemented the Irtoun (“Rise Again”) program, with a goal to enhance food security and economic resilience of communities recovering from the effects of conflict in northern Mali.
Following a cost modification in September of 2016, the program during the reporting period updated the beneficiaries, calculated the seed needs, met with extension services, retrained on project management and M&E tools, assessed the animal fodder, monitored village savings and loan associations and agents and started Irtoun II.
This booklet contains fifteen short stories told by field staff of the 2SCALE project about their personal experiences on how their work impacted a particular person or group. The booklet results from a regional review and capitalisation workshop that was organised in Benin in March 2017 within the framework of the 2SCALE programme. 2SCALE (Towards Sustainable Clusters in Agribusiness through Learning in Entrepreneurship) is a major agribusiness incubator programme implemented since 2012, and is aimed at promoting inclusive agribusiness partnerships in nine African countries.