All Articles

The burden of low-quality diets and childhood undernutrition is widespread in rural areas in Sub-Saharan Africa, where households rely mostly on agriculture. Various empirical studies have shown the relative importance of the market, and hence food purchases, compared with farm diversification in raising dietary diversity.

Recognising potential selection bias due to non-randomness of the data, this study used propensity score matching on data from a nationally representative fifth Integrated Household Survey (IHS5) to investigate the effect of agriculture extension services on the technical efficiency of maize farmers in Malawi.

Cette étude examine l'impact économique de l'utilisation des semences améliorées sur la sécurité alimentaire des ménages ruraux au Cameroun.

The world is facing unprecedented challenges from COVID-19, which is disrupting lives and livelihoods. The pandemic could profoundly affect the African continent and wipe out hard-won development gains, as sub-Saharan Africa heads into its first recession in 25 years.

Farm efficiency analysis provides significant insights into farms’ potential to enhance agricultural productivity. This article reports on an investigation of technology adoption and technical efficiency (TE) in the Ethiopian maize sector.

This study seeks to identify the internal and external factors determining Ethiopia’s bilateral exports and total trade flows. It uses panel data covering 21 major trading partners of Ethiopia from 2000 to 2017 and estimates an augmented fixed effects gravity model.

This study examines the impact of privatisation on the productivity of smallholder sugarcane out-growers in Malawi using a case study of Dwangwa Cane Growers Limited (DCGL).

Agricultural commercialisation is a critical pathway for economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). However, the lack of market information may impede this development. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to examine market information and preferences for soybean quality in a developing-world context.

Using an original database from French archives on French trade statistics, this article undertakes a comprehensive study of the nature and dynamic of French sectoral trade for the period 1880 to 1912.

This study investigates the relationships between financial inclusion, gender and household welfare. We used baseline data collected from a randomised control trial survey of maize farmers in Nigeria and computed multidimensional indices for financial inclusion and farmers’ household welfare.

Livestock, particularly cattle, are an integral part of livelihoods in rural sub-Saharan Africa. However, diseases such as African animal trypanosomosis (AAT) have limited the potential of this important sector in the rural household economy.

The study provides evidence for how risk preferences determine fishing location choices by artisanal fishers on the south-west coast of the island of Mauritius. Risk preference is modelled using a random linear utility framework defined over mean-standard deviation space.

Insect pollination improves the yield of most crop species and contributes to one-third of global crop production. The importance of this ecosystem service in improving agricultural production has largely been overlooked, however, in favour of practices that improve soil conditions such as fertiliser use and supplementary irrigation.

There is an emerging body of studies assessing the influence of resilience on household food security in developing countries. Yet no study has systematically analysed this theme in Zimbabwe, an area that we address.

Since 2002, a range of South African policies have attempted to address the disproportionate burden of food and nutrition insecurity on the population. Yet malnutrition among the poor has worsened.

This study investigates the driving factors that influence farmers’ decisions to adopt modern agricultural inputs (MAI) and how this affects farm household welfare in rural Rwanda. To account for heterogeneity in the MAI adoption decision and unobservable farm and household attributes, we estimate an endogenous switching regression (ESR) model.

This study investigates risk perceptions and management strategies among maize growers in the equatorial region of South Sudan. A cross-sectional study design included a survey questionnaire that was used to analyse data from 510 respondents.

One of the three components of Rwanda’s flagship anti-poverty programme, Vision 2020 Umurenge (VUP), is the provision of credit to relatively poor households, nearly all of them farmers. In this paper we estimate the impact of the programme using high-quality household survey data from 2013/2014 and 2016/2017.

Cette étude analyse les effets de la politique de réglementation de la vente du soja sur les performances des producteurs au Bénin de 1990 à 2023, en se concentrant sur l'offre de production et le revenu net agricole.

Smallholder rural farmers are exposed to diverse idiosyncratic and covariate shocks that lead to high income and consumption volatility. Formal cash management tools, which are important for managing risk and volatility, often break down due to high information asymmetries and the transaction costs of operating in rural areas.

To arrest the ongoing ecological disaster in the country, the government of Zimbabwe implemented the Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources (CAMPFIRE). Through the CAMPFIRE programme, each ward could benefit from two land uses – agriculture and wildlife.

Variability in climate and debility in soil fertility affect agrarian production, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, and thus threaten food security. This has prompted the seed sector to introduce various varieties of climate-smart maize in Kenya and release them in the market. In contrast, there is little experiential insight into how the adoption of these varieties by small-scale farmers affects their household income.

One of the debates around sustainability and the scaling up of micro-financial services is the commercialisation of micro-finance institutions (MFIs). This paper examines the contribution of the commercialisation of MFIs to ensuring the sustainability of MFIs and in scaling up their commitment to serve their primary target groups: poor and marginalised people.

The study employed the Phillips and Sul log-t convergence test to analyse the degree of convergence for the Niger Basin region (NBR) countries in terms of per capita carbon emission and food availability.