Agricultural innovations are seen as a key avenue to improve nutrition and health in smallholder farm households. But details of these agriculture-nutrition-health linkages are not yet well understood. While there is a broad literature on the adoption of agricultural technologies, most studies primarily focus on impacts in terms of productivity and income. Nutrition and health impacts have rarely been analyzed. In this article, we argue that future impact studies should include nutrition and health dimensions more explicitly.
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.
In Sub-Sahara Africa, adoption rates of improved crop varieties remain relatively low, which is partly due to farmers’ limited access to information. In smallholder settings, information often spreads through informal networks. Better understanding of such networks could potentially help to spur innovation and farmers’ exposure to new technologies. This study uses survey data from Tanzania to analyze social networks and their role for the spread of information about improved varieties of maize and sorghum.