This study considers what lessons might be learned from the cassava value chain in the context of CTA’s interest in the potentials of: digital financial services for agriculture, such as mobile payments for farmers’ products; other payment streams for financial inclusion of farmer; index based insurance services; digital services to support access to loans and credits. This research provides a comprehensive market study of cash usage behavioural practices and financial literacy among cassava farmers in Ghana and Nigeria.
This study presents the results from a meso-inventory conducted in Kebbi State, Northern Nigeria between March and July 2018. Was explored the extent to which the farmed-fish value chain is transforming structurally and the roles of capture fishing versus farmed fish. Kebbi is one of Nigeria’s leading states for fish production. Though largely Sudan Savanna (in the north) and Northern Guinea savanna (in the south), and thus semi-arid tropics, there is still a lot of water and a lot of fish.
Over the last 10 years much has been written about the role of the private sector as part of a more widely-conceived notion of agricultural sector capacity for innovation and development. This paper discusses the emergence of a new class of private enterprise in East Africa that would seem to have an important role in efforts to tackle poverty reduction and food security. These organisations appear to occupy a niche that sits between mainstream for-profit enterprises and the developmental activities of government programmes, NGOs and development projects.
This study examines the contributions of IFPRI over the last 10 years to policy development, training, and capacity-strengthening activities with Malawi, focused particularly on addressing the chronic food insecurity and malnutrition that has prevailed for the last 60 years.The paper is divided into five sections.
Mobile phone based money services have spread rapidly in many developing countries. We analyze micro level impacts using panel data from smallholder farmers in Kenya. Mobile money use has a large positive net impact on household income. One important pathway is through remittances, which contribute to income directly but also help to reduce risk and liquidity constraints, thus promoting agricultural commercialization. Mobile money users apply more purchased inputs, market a larger proportion of their output, and have higher farm profits.
Supermarkets and high-value exports are currently gaining ground in the agri-food systems of many developing countries. While recent research has analyzed income effects in the small farm sector, impacts on farming efficiency have hardly been studied. Using a survey of Kenyan vegetable growers and a stochastic frontier approach, we show that participation in supermarket channels increases mean technical efficiency by 19%. This gain is bigger at lower levels of efficiency, suggesting the potential for positive income distribution effects.
National governments, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, have limited budgets and are forced to make difficult funding decisions regarding the provision of social services and the support of agricultural programs. These provisions can play a critical role in rural incomes and agricultural production but due to data constraints, the effects of different types of social services on agricultural productivity in this region have not been analyzed in detail.
Classical innovation adoption models implicitly assume homogenous information flow across farmers, which is often not realistic. As a result, selection bias in adoption parameters may occur. We focus on tissue culture (TC) banana technology that was introduced in Kenya more than 10 years ago. Up till now, adoption rates have remained relatively low.
Most micro-level studies on the impact of agricultural technologies build on cross-section data, which can lead to unreliable impact estimates. Here, we use panel data covering two time periods to estimate the impact of tissue culture (TC) banana technology in the Kenyan small farm sector. TC banana is an interesting case, because previous impact studies showed mixed results. We combine propensity score matching with a difference-in-difference estimator to control for selection bias and account for temporal impact variability.
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.