All Articles

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.

To enrich agriculture reform and reap its benefits, policy makers need to localise policy issues within and across their domestic zones. Using a stochastic meta-frontier function, this study analysed the production efficiency of the cassava subsector of cassava growers from Bomi and Nimba counties in Liberia.

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.

Farmer–herder conflicts deepen the incidence of poverty and worsen the wellbeing of both farming and herding households in Sub-Saharan Africa. In order to cope with the effects of conflict on their livelihoods, households adopt various adaptation strategies.

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.

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.

Empirical studies on the effects of governance structures on incentives have still received little attention in the wheat value chain research of developing countries. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of governance structures on actors’ incentives in different functional nodes of the wheat value chain.

The starting point for this article is the concept of a commodity exchange. A working definition is a physical or – more likely – electronic marketplace for buying, selling and trading commodities, whether ‘hard’ commodities, which typically are natural resources that must be mined or extracted (gold, rubber, oil, etc.), or ‘soft’ commodities, which are mainly agricultural products or livestock (coffee, corn, cotton, sugar, soybeans, etc.).

Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) is viewed as a potentially effective intervention to address low agricultural productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), while strengthening farmers’ capacity to adapt to the effects of climate change.

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.

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.

This study investigates the relationship between women’s empowerment in agriculture, their nutritional status and those of their children. Growing empirical evidence suggests that there is a positive link, but that not all empowerment dimensions influence nutritional outcomes.

Food security remains a major challenge in Burkina Faso, despite national and international commitments to reverse it. This paper evaluates the effect of the combined diversification of cash crops and food crops on the food security of rural farming households in Burkina Faso.

This study examines the complementarity and substitutability effect of private investment and public expenditure on agricultural productivity in Nigeria for the period 1978 to 2018. The study employs the vector error correction modelling (VECM) technique, and the estimate shows that government expenditure on the agricultural sector had the most significant effect on agricultural productivity, followed by commercial bank credit for the agricultural sector.

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.

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.

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.

Improving local rice production capacity is a key element on the agenda of most countries in the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU).

This study aimed to evaluate the impact of cluster farming on the wheat output and input commercialisation level.

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 study applied stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) and data envelopment analysis (DEA) to examine the technical efficiency of maize production in northern Ghana using cross-sectional data from 360 maize farmers for the 2011/2012 cropping season.

Although organic farming is increasingly perceived as a viable alternative to conventional agriculture in the face of deteriorating environmental ecosystems, little is known about consumers’ preferences for organic products in Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper bridges this gap in research and investigates the extent to which consumers value organic food in Dakar, Senegal.

This paper evaluates the extent to which changes in international wheat prices are transmitted to domestic markets in Kenya using an error correction model (ECM) that employs monthly producer price data for the period 2002 to 2020. Domestic wheat markets in Kenya were found to be strongly integrated while, international wheat markets were cointegrated with domestic prices at the port of Mombasa.

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.