All Articles

Conservation agriculture is promoted as a green technology that enhances the productivity and food security of farmers. However, there is limited evidence from practising farmers regarding these expected outcomes.

Nutrition knowledge is an important driver of household dietary diversity that can be improved through access to nutrition information. However, in many rural areas, the formal flow of nutrition information is limited, although social networks could play an important role as an informal source of such information.

This paper examines farmers’ preferences for an improved Bambara groundnut variety, the key attributes desired, factors influencing preference, and the number of attributes desired by smallholder farmers in Ghana.

This study assesses the mechanism of the transmission of international price shocks to producer prices of coffee and cocoa in Togo. A threshold autoregressive (TAR) model was estimated using monthly series of international and producer prices of coffee and cocoa in Togo from 1994 to 2018.

This study examines the productivity of smallholder groundnut farmers in North-eastern Mozambique using data for 2016 from two provinces with high total production of said crop.

This is a special issue of the African Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics (AfJARE), with papers contributed by the faculty members of the Collaborative Master’s in Agricultural and Applied Economics (CMAAE), one of the collaborative training programmes of the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC).

In this paper, we explore the role of wildlife in climate change adaptation, especially in areas used predominantly for livestock production in South Africa. Using a sample of 3 449 wildlife and livestock ranches, we estimate a multinomial choice model of various ranching options in these areas. The results indicate that mixed wildlife-livestock ranches are less vulnerable to climate change when compared to ranches with only wildlife or only livestock.

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.

With increasing recognition holding the promise of overcoming the outstanding problems faced by African agriculture, IAR4D faces the danger of being ‘blurred’ by past approaches and falling short of its potential to deliver the desired impacts in diverse multi-stakeholder, biophysical, socioAfJARE economic, cultural, technological and market contexts unless its actualisation and working is clearly understood.

Women’s time allocation is a dimension of women’s empowerment in agriculture, and is recognised as a pathway through which agriculture can affect child nutritional status in developing countries. Longer hours of farm work can potentially increase women’s time constraints, reducing the time allocated to child-caring responsibilities and raising the risk of poor child nutritional status.

This paper argues and provides empirical evidence that trade-offs and/or complementarities are inherent in technological options that shape the adoption of and land-use decisions in production systems involving multiple crops in Ethiopia.

This paper examines determinants of the adoption of rainwater-harvesting technologies in a rain shadow area of southern Malawi. The most common ex situ technologies in the area were dams, and the widely used in situ technologies were box ridges, contour markers and swales.

This article examines the current state of food safety preparedness and response in three representative countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA): Kenya, Senegal and South Africa. We focus on foodborne diseases associated with the microbial contamination of animal-sourced foods.

Kenya, like most countries in the Eastern and Southern Africa region, has continued to be overwhelmed by high and volatile food prices. In an effort to mitigate this problem, the government has implemented various trade and marketing policy instruments. The aim of this study is to examine whether the policies implemented have achieved their desired effects.

This paper analyses the heterogeneous effects of membership of a farmer group on access to water, use of inorganic fertiliser, household incomes, and farm asset holdings. A sample of 401 irrigators in South Africa was analysed using propensity score matching. The study found that group membership had a positive effect on all four outcomes.

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.

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.

This study uses an online laboratory experiment and a post-experimental survey to test whether the Mastercard Foundation (MCF) scholarship programme causally influences the creation of cognitive social capital among University of Pretoria recipients.

Accessing water supply services remains a serious challenge in Wakiso District in Uganda, where most households travel long distances to collect water – a process that threatens their health, productivity and economic wellbeing.

The use of novel feed ingredients from aquaculture is growing globally. However, their contributions to scalable and sustainable aquafeed solutions are unclear. New ingredients for feeds are desired in the framework of sustainability and a circular economy; thus, initiatives for implementing such novel ingredients are of interest to agricultural practitioners.

Vitamin A deficiency is still a challenge in many African countries, including Tanzania. Survey data were gathered in Tanzania to determine consumers’ risk perceptions of vitamin A deficiency (VAD) and severe visual impairment.

This study analyses the trade-offs between welfare (measured by income) and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions using a farm-level optimisation model that incorporates the predominant cereal (sorghum), legumes (groundnut, soybeans), livestock (cattle, goats and sheep) and trees (locust bean, camel’s foot) representative of production systems at two contrasting sites in northern Nigeria.

Poverty in its various forms is widespread among smallholder farmers, including income poverty, rendering interventions that improve household income relevant. We employ a linear model on cross-sectional data collected from October to December 2015, with the preceding 12 months as the reference period.

The influence of food aid and remittances on West African food import demand is evaluated using a Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) model. Our results show that imports of oilseeds and the rest of the agricultural products category are highly price elastic, and that fruit and vegetables and dairy products are least responsive to price changes.