All Articles

Using the potential outcomes framework, we estimate the influence of the adoption gap, adoption drivers and impact of adopting improved groundnut varieties (IGVs) on groundnut yield among smallholder farmers in Nigeria.

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.

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.

The impact of women’s empowerment in agriculture on women\s health, indicated by their body mass index (BMI), is examined using an instrumental variable estimation approach on a sample of 4 267 women.

The underutilisation of coconut and its by-products imply poor livelihoods and, ultimately food insecurity for farmers growing coconut. Sustainable practices like a circular economy (CE) need to be promoted for uptake by the farmers to achieve sustainable development through better utilisation of coconuts and their by-products.

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.

Weather is an important determinant of household well-being in rural Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper explores the relationship between novel measures of cropping-season weather conditions and household food consumption in rural Niger, and how household coping mechanisms mediate that relationship.

This article analyses the level of integration in pastoral markets in Kenya using high-frequency data generated through a crowdsourcing endeavour. The vector error-correction model framework was used to estimate the causal relationships between the short- and long-run market price.

We look at the prioritisation of agricultural value chains (VCs) for the allocation of R&D resources that maximise development outcomes (poverty, growth, jobs and diets) in Senegal.

Cet article analyse l’impact des chocs agro-climatiques sur la sécurité alimentaire des ménages ruraux sénégalais à l'aide d'un modèle probit ordonné. La méthode du score de consommation alimentaire est utilisée pour appréhender l'état de la sécurité alimentaire des ménages. L’étude montre que 14% des ménages vivant en milieu rural sont à consommation alimentaire faible, 17% à consommation alimentaire limite, et 69% à consommation alimentaire acceptable.

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 a large body of literature documents the existence of informal arrangements to share risk across and within households, there has been little research on the various coping strategies through which risk sharing takes place, and how these strategies function.

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.

Potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) is known for its efficiency in converting resources into high-quality food, which can aid in poverty reduction. However, the potato yield in Rwanda has been declining, leading to farmer dissatisfaction with trading terms and a reliance on low prices in the value chain.

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.

The adoption of improved agricultural technologies is known to significantly improve incomes, create more wealth, alleviate poverty and contribute to rural development in many developing countries.

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.

The inverse farm size and productivity relationship (IR) is a recurring theme in the literature. However, most previous studies were undertaken within a setting of mixed cropping systems. In this article, we investigate the effect of farm size on productivity within the context of a perennial mono-cropping system, acute competition for farmland, frequent subdivision of farms and declining yields.

This study attempted to identify determinants of farmers’ maximum willingness to pay (WTP) for improved use of irrigation water.

The Government of the Republic of Zambia (GRZ) has reformed the implementation of the Farmer Input Support Programme (FISP). The objective of FISP is to increase competitiveness in the agricultural sector among all key players (input suppliers, agro-dealers, banks, etc.), while improving farmers’ welfare.

Descriptive statistics show that women with land rights were more empowered, younger, more educated and owned more land than those without land rights.

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.

Dans le but d’appréhender l’influence des types de contrat de travail sur les performances des exploitations cacaoyères dans le Mbam et Kim au Cameroun, un échantillonnage raisonné a permis de sélectionner 114 exploitants cacaoyers. L’approche à deux étapes recourant aux modèles Data Enveloppent Analysis (DEA) et Tobit censuré a permis d’analyser l’efficacité des exploitations.

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.