All Articles

African animal trypanosomiasis (AAT) and its vectors, mainly tsetse, are a major constraint to livestock production in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Control efforts have been ongoing for decades, but finding a sustainable solution remains a major concern.

The conditions in which increased market participation leads to improved technical efficiency are still not adequately understood. This study therefore investigated farmers’ market participation rates and their predicted technical efficiency scores by performing a two-stage least squares (2SLS) regression analysis using household-level data obtained from the 2009 Ethiopian rural household survey.

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.

The recent increase in farmland investments in developing countries by private equity funds, large multinationals and sometimes foreign governments has attracted widespread attention and strong emotions from various interest groups.

This study uses primary data from smallholder sugarcane farmers in Kenya to investigate how women’s empowerment affects household poverty. Instrumental-variable tobit (IV tobit) was used to determine the causality between women’s empowerment and household poverty.

Smallholder farmers face considerable risk and uncertainty, particularly when markets are incomplete or missing. We consider household crop diversity and crop choice in Zimbabwe, where output markets are largely absent and price signals are inaccurate.

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.

Poultry waste management and the energy demand have generated environmental and climate change concerns. Experts have suggested converting poultry waste to biogas energy through recycling to reduce these concerns.

In sub-Saharan Africa, identifying estimates of consumers’ preferences and willingness to pay (WTP) for safe food continues to receive attention in the literature. Using experimental data from Nigeria, we examined the source of heterogeneities in preference and WTP for organically produced food.

Using a non-experimental cross-sectional dataset of 471 households, we evaluate the impacts of satellite collection points (SCPs) under the Purchase for Progress (P4P) initiative implemented by the World Food Programme (WFP) on storage decisions and crop income from maize sales among smallholder farmers in Uganda.

Cette étude analyse l’efficacité des producteurs de riz dans l’allocation des ressources dont ils disposent pour la production en recueillant des données transversales auprès de 255 producteurs dans le Centre-Ouest de la Côte d’Ivoire.

The present study aims to estimate the marginal cost of potable water supply and analyse the implications for more efficient, equitable and income-adequate tap water tariffs in Tunisia.

Soybean is one of the key legume crops that provides several financial benefits for farming households in Malawi. However, Malawi's persisting efforts to improve smallholder productivity and diversification have only translated into moderate improvements in food security outcomes.

Rural areas across the developing countries in every region of the world lag behind their urban counterparts in many important sectors and, most importantly, in improved water supply services.

Zambia has been implementing agricultural input subsidy programmes to stimulate crop production and productivity among smallholder farmers with the goal of increasing national food security.

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.

While irrigation is key to boosting agricultural productivity in Burkina Faso, it may come with hidden health costs. Drawing on data from over 1 000 households in the Sourou Valley and using propensity score matching, this study uncovers the unintended consequences of irrigation for public health.

This study applied the zero-inefficiency stochastic frontier (ZISF) to analyse the technical efficiency of 333 improved rice-farming households for the 2012/2013 farming season in Ghana.

This paper assesses the differences in technical efficiency of, and the cassava production systems employed by, male-managed (MMF) and female-managed (FMF) cassava farms in the Fanteakwa District of Ghana.

Fair trade is an important ethical concern in the food value chains of developed countries. However, there is a dearth of empirical insights into consumer preferences for this critical aspect in the domestic markets of developing countries.

The adoption of improved agricultural technologies is very low in Tanzania, which has led to both low crop productivity and low production. This paper therefore analyses the factors that influence the adoption of improved seeds, inorganic fertilisers and a package of technologies by smallholder maize farmers in Tanzania

Climate variability threatens farmers’ livelihoods. Efforts to address climate stress recognise climate-smart agriculture (CSA) as a promising approach to minimising the damage caused by increasing weather variability.

The determinants of the technical efficiency (TE) of adopters and non-adopters of soil and water conservation (SWC) technologies in the upper Rwizi micro-catchment of south-western Uganda are compared using cross-sectional survey data from 246 smallholder farmers.

The reintroduction of innovative forms of input subsidies in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) following the food crisis of 2008 raises concerns about their effectiveness in the fight against poverty. In this context, this paper examines the effect of the targeted fertiliser subsidy implemented in Togo from 2017 to 2019.